Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 4.djvu/205

TUNING. although the old kind had chords better than could be found in musical instruments generally. He does not allude to his father, but brings in a hitherto unused interval in keyboard instrument tuning—the Fourth. Not, it is true, in place of the Fifth; but as one of the trials to test the accuracy of the tuning. At the present time beginners in tuning find the Fourth a difficult interval when struck simultaneously with the note to which it makes the interval: there is a feeling of dissonance not at all perceptible in the Fifth. It is therefore not strange that for centuries we do not find it used for instruments capable of more or less sustained harmony. The introduction of a short groundwork for the piano, confined to the simple chromatic scale between  is traditionally attributed to Robert Wornum, early in the present century. In this now universally adopted system for the piano, the Fourth is regarded and treated as the inversion of the Fifth; and for the intentional 'Mean-tone' system [see ] employed almost universally up to about 1840–50, the following groundwork came into use:—

—the wolf being, as of old, at the meeting of G♯ and E♭. The advantages of the short system were in the greater resemblance of vibration between notes so near, and the facilities offered for using common chords as trials. It will be observed that the pitch-note has changed from F to the treble C; possibly from the introduction of the in 1711. In Great Britain and Italy a C-fork has been nearly always adhered to since that date for keyboard instruments; but for the violins, A (on account of the violin open string), which in France and Germany has been also adopted as the keyboard tuning-note. But the pitchpipe may have also had to do with the change of pitch-note.

The long tuning scale did not at once go out of use; it was adhered to for organs, and for pianos by tuners of the old school. It went out in Messrs. Broadwood's establishment with the last tuner who used it, about the year 1869. The change to intentional equal temperament in pianos in 1846, in England, which preceded by some years the change in the organ, was ushered in by an inclination to sharper major thirds: examples differing as different tuners were inclined to more or less 'sweet' common chords of C, G, and F. The wolf ceasing to howl so loudly, another short groundwork, which went through the chain of fourths and fifths without break, became by degrees more general with the piano until it prevailed entirely. It is as follows:

and is also the groundwork for tuning the harmonium.

The organ no longer remains with the groundwork of fifths and octaves; the modern tuners use fourths and fifths in the treble C—C, of the Principal; entirely disregarding the thirds. Like the harmonium the organ is tuned entirely by beats. Organ pipes are tuned by cutting them down shorter, or piecing them out longer, when much alteration has to be made. When they are nearly of the right pitch, (1) metal pipes are 'coned in' by putting on and pressing down the 'tuning horn,' to turn the edges in for flattening, or 'coned out' by inserting and pressing down the tuning horn to turn the edges out for sharpening; (2) stopped pipes, wooden or metal, are sharpened by screwing or pushing the stopper down, or flattened by pulling it up; (3) reed pipes by a tuning wire which lengthens or shortens the vibrating portion of the tongue. Harmoniums are tuned by scraping the metal tongue of the reed near the free end to sharpen the tone, and near the attached end to flatten it.

The old way of tuning pianos by the Tuning Hammer (or a Tuning Lever) remains in vogue, notwithstanding the ever-recurring attempts to introduce mechanical contrivances of screws etc., which profess to make tuning easy and to bring it more or less within the immediate control of the player. Feasible as such an improvement appears to be, it has not yet come into the domain of the practical. The co-ordination of hand and ear, possessed by a skilled tuner, still prevails, and the difficulty of getting the wire to pass over the bridge, continuously and equally without the governed strain of the tuner's hand, is still to be overcome before a mechanical system can rival a tuner's dexterity.

In considering practical tuning we must at once dismiss the idea that the ear of a musician is capable of distinguishing small fractions of a complete vibration in a second. Professor Preyer of Jena limits the power of perception of the difference of pitch of two notes heard in succession by the best ears to about one third of a double vibration in a second in any part of the scale. By the phenomena of beats between two notes heard at the same time we can make much finer distinctions, which are of great use in tuning the organ and harmonium; but with the piano we may not entirely depend upon them, and a good musical ear for melodic succession has the advantage. In fact the rapid beats of the upper partial tones frequently prevent the recognition of the slower beats of the fundamental tones of the notes themselves until they become too