Content area
Full Text
Musical pitch in America throughout the nineteenth century followed European trends, which varied considerably. It is likely that European guitars made in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were designed to be tuned to a pitch of about a=435 Hz, and although this may have been decreed as a standard in France in 1859, pitch continued to rise. In an attempt to curb this trend, the Walcker Orgelbau Great Organ for the Boston Music Hall, Massachusetts, was tuned to a=435 Hz when erected in 1863. Only a few years later, a second Walcker was installed in the First Church of Boston, also tuned to French pitch. Despite the introduction of this pitch standard into Boston's public schools, instruments used by both American and foreign touring orchestras, opera troupes, and musical organizations remained high.1 Tuning to a higher pitch, together with developments in the production of steel leading to its use as a stringing material for the guitar, resulted in greater stresses exerted on the instrument that required innovations in guitar design to withstand the new stresses. By examining the types of strings offered in North American musical merchandise catalogs and their representation in periodicals of the Banjo-Mandolin-Guitar movement, the gradual emergence of steel as a string material can be traced, which, in turn, generated contemporaneous patent applications for bridges and tailpieces that indicate rising string tension.
String Manufacture in Mid-Nineteenth-Century North America
The first six-single-string guitars in North America were brought there from Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Evidence of European guitar strings, such as those associated with the Shelley guitar (ca. 1822) in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and with a guitar made by Pons (1812), owned by Giuliani and deposited in a Coutt's Bank vault in 1816,2 indicates that plain gut trebles and silk-core basses overwound with a fine metal, usually copper, were normal on the six-string guitar.3 Pasquale Vinaccia is credited with first using steel for the first and second courses of the Neapolitan mandolin in ca.1835.4 While the stress of a 13-inch (330 mm) mandolin string tuned to eis equal to that of a guitar string of double the length an octave lower, meaning the guitar theoretically could have been stung with steel at that date,...