Abstract Summary
Over the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, classical music was increasingly perceived as a universal language in Western countries. At the same time, however, intensifying processes of globalization and growing historical knowledge about the musical past revealed the plurality of musical systems in use across nations and time. In response to this complexification of the Western musical field, attempts were made to standardize pitch as a way of helping to regulate and secure such historical and geographical exchanges. Collections of pitch data, based on methods from the natural sciences, were a first step towards gaining control over tuning practices. But the production of this knowledge on pitch was embedded in different material, professional, scientific, and linguistic contexts, a diversity that challenged the universalist aims of pitch data collection and in some ways exacerbated the existing chaos in sonic and musical practices. Analyzing the epistemic struggles of two scholars (the British Alexander J. Ellis and the American Charles R. Cross) who attempted to create a unified language to represent and circulate pitch data in the late nineteenth century, my paper highlights the variety of disciplines—natural sciences, musicography, linguistics—involved in the production of acoustic knowledge at the time and their entanglement with their diverse fields of application, whether musical performance, instrument making, or psychophysics. Examining these intersections in a comparative and transnational perspective allows me to recover the political implications of pitch data and stress the significance of sound for the study of nationalism and internationalism.
Self-Designated Keywords :
History of Humanities, technology, sound, politics
