Today in 1919, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the massive conflict known today as World War I after more than four years of fighting.
Critics have noted that the parts of the treaty that punished the Central Powers likely set the scene for a second world war a few decades later.
But there are other sections that are clearly meant to get the warring sides back on the road to living and working together again.
There are clauses about international trade, shipping, railways, even standard musical pitch.
If I can get technical for a moment: you can assign a number value to each musical note to represent its pitch in Hertz.
Today, the standard A note above middle C is 440 Hz.
But in the old days, orchestras might have a very different pitch for that A note.
They would usually tune around the pipe organ, and depending on the way that organ was set up, A above middle C could be under 400 Hz, or well above 500 Hz, or somewhere in between.
Later, as orchestras started to tour and big instrument makers started to become more prominent, there were attempts to get everybody on board with a set of agreed upon pitches, but it proved challenging.
In the 19th Century cities in Europe were building concert halls bigger and bigger.
That meant more and more people could attend the concerts, but it also changed the sound of the orchestras.
Lower frequency notes travel farther than higher frequency notes, so in these bigger rooms, the high notes were getting drowned out and the orchestras were sounding dull.
To compensate, they kept raising their pitches higher and higher, until singers’ voices and quite a few instruments started to strain under all those extra high notes.
An international convention in 1885 set the A above middle C at 435 Hertz, and while negotiators agreed to a number of other conventions for post-Great War life, they decided that 1885 deal should stand as the international concert pitch standard.
But of course it didn’t stay that way.
Orchestras in the UK and the US in particular liked to tune just a bit higher than what was sometimes called French pitch or international pitch.
There was another international conference in 1939, and that set A above middle C at the current 440 Hz, as part of what is known as modern tuning.
So the agreement on musical pitch was one of many parts of the Treaty of Versailles that didn’t last that long.
Fort Mitchell, Kentucky is home to the Vent Haven billed as “The World’s Only Museum Dedicated To Ventriloquism.”
On Sunday, the museum is hosting a fun run and walk known as The Dummy Run 5K.
Do the ventriloquist dummies run with you?
High Pitch, Low Pitch and Modern Pitch (Robb Stewart Brass Instruments)
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Photo by Shaylor via Flickr/Creative Commons
