The international pitch A = 440 is quite recent (1939) but other standard pitches also exist. The length of organ pipes gives us information on earlier pitches and shows that the same note often had different frequencies on different instruments.
In Alsace the great organ in Strassburg (1713) had A = 393; the Hamburg organ (1688) was tuned to A = 489, almost four semitones higher. And that is not all, for the general church pitch in northern Germany was given by Praetorius (1619) as A = 567 (six semitones higher than Strassburg).
Secular music was often played higher than religious music, so there were "chamber" pitches which were very different from the church pitches. Similar differences existed in other countries.
At the beginning of the 18th century attempts were made to standardise musical pitch but the A still varied between 415 and 430 and continued to do so for about a century until musicians, seeking more brilliance, started to raise it.
In 1879 the orchestra of Covent Garden tuned to A = 450 while in America "concert pitch" was at 461.6. In 1859 a French government commission recommended A = 435 as a standard and this then became the most widely used in Europe. Elsewhere, however, there was no single pitch: in America A = 440 was often taken as standard; in England the custom was to tune to C rather than A, with C = 522 (corresponding to A = 438.9).
In 1939 an international conference in London established A = 440 as the new international standard. Yet there are still differences between countries today. These differences affect instrument making: an instrument made in a country where the pitch has a certain tendency (higher, for example), will be difficult to tune in another country. This is especially true for wind instruments and for tuned percussion, which become unusable.
These differences between countries are also to be found in musical notation. There is no universal system. Figure 2 gives the octave names and note names on a piano keyboard in French, English and German.
