A student of mine submitted a paper on transposing instruments for the theory pedagogy class I teach. He began the paper with a brief history of transposition and how it came about. Evidently different organs in different towns were all pitched differently and if a piece of music traveled from one town to another, the organist might be forced to transpose the piece to fit the range of the choir. (The student has copious footnotes and references, which I won't post here; I didn't know this before and I'm trusting his work). All this is to say that until fairly recently, there was no international pitch standard: the middle C in Vienna could be a fourth different from the middle C in Paris.
A paper given at SMT by Michael Klein (dealing with Bergsonian temporality, another thing about which I knew/know nothing) related that the railroads were the reason that standard time came into being. Trains needed to be able to schedule their stops consistently in various towns, hence, the time had to be the same in all of those towns. All this is to say there was no (inter?)national time standard until the mid-1800s.
These two observations suggest the following two questions to me:
First, how might an understanding of how time was kept in pre-1850 (or so) Europe enhance our understanding of music written during that time? (I think I can safely assume that minutes were minutes everywhere, and hours were hours everywhere) How might the standardization of time have affected music composition (if at all)?
Second, if a train leaves Vienna at 6:52 am (Vienna time, ca. 1830) headed for Paris, and a second train leaves Paris at 7:16 am (Paris time, ca. 1830), what key will the organ in Munich be tuned to?
A paper given at SMT by Michael Klein (dealing with Bergsonian temporality, another thing about which I knew/know nothing) related that the railroads were the reason that standard time came into being. Trains needed to be able to schedule their stops consistently in various towns, hence, the time had to be the same in all of those towns. All this is to say there was no (inter?)national time standard until the mid-1800s.
These two observations suggest the following two questions to me:
First, how might an understanding of how time was kept in pre-1850 (or so) Europe enhance our understanding of music written during that time? (I think I can safely assume that minutes were minutes everywhere, and hours were hours everywhere) How might the standardization of time have affected music composition (if at all)?
Second, if a train leaves Vienna at 6:52 am (Vienna time, ca. 1830) headed for Paris, and a second train leaves Paris at 7:16 am (Paris time, ca. 1830), what key will the organ in Munich be tuned to?