I have placed on the Los Angeles PTG website two wonderful articles from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition. The first is titled "Pianoforte", and is pretty much a history of the piano starting with the Pythagorean monochord, working its way through the introduction of iron into the pianoforte, and then gradually working its way through to the Apollo player piano in 1900. Lots of very detailed engravings and footnotes as well as a full column of references. The article runs 16 pages. The second article is titled "Musical Pitch". It starts by defining what pitch actually means and includes a very good history on everything you ever wanted to know about "A4" and its theoretical standard frequency. Includes a number of tables documenting what pitch was used when, and who the authority was. Also talks about what standards some piano manufactures chose. This article runs 4 pages. Both articles are available free for the download. The Encyclopedia Britannica informed me that the entire edition is long out of copyright and gladly gave me permission to share it. Both articles have been carefully scanned at high print resolution, cleaned up and combined into a single .pdf file, (Acrobat Reader), for convenience. ** Special dial-up warning ** This is a 20 Mb file and even with a high speed DSL connection it takes close to 2 minutes to download. To download, please visit: http://www.la-ptg.org/additionalResources/ -- Geoff Sykes -- Assoc. Los Angeles -----Original Message----- From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of ed440 at mindspring.com Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 4:37 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: * History of Pitch Standards For an extensive, interesting and easy to read paper on the history of pitch standards, please see Ed Swenson's web site via the member web site page of <ptg.org> If anyone knows of a better compendium of documented information, please let us know. Ed Sutton
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