Origin Of Ab/eb Tuninq

[david fabre]

I know that a lot of vintage anglos were tuned in Ab/Eb and have

read at several places that such instruments were intented to

play with brass bands. This puzzles me a little bit, because brass

instruments are usually tuned in Bb and Eb.

It would thus make more sense to use a concertina in Eb/Bb,

but these do not seem to exist.

 

Has anybody an explanation for this puzzle ?

[Stephen Chambers]

I suppose it depends on how you look at it, but by the same token that a C/G Anglo is played in D, then an Ab/Eb is in Bb. They were indeed made for playing in the same keys as brass instruments, mainly for the Salvation Army.

[wntrmute]

My understanding is that two things happened. One is that concert pitch (A=440Hz) went up. Classical vocalists have problems with some of the high notes, I've heard, because they are pitched higher now than when the composers wrote them. The second is that equal temperment took over from just intonation. In equal temperment the relationship between each half tone is equal, in just intonation each scale's notes have their own unique intervals. More or less, anyways. In equal temperment you can play any song in any key, but with the old intonation each key had it's own 'feel' so a song written in D could sound slightly 'off' if it were transposed into A, for example. The Minasi tutor on concertina.com indicates that the original german concertinas were tuned to play the C scale in the key of A. That meant that they would play in A/E, but with the note intervals of C/G which were different from the note intervals of A/E.

If that makes sense.

[Lawrence Reeves]

Stephen is absolutely correct about the brass instruments. A Bb Tenor( which replaced the C melody instrument in the 1930s) sax when playing a written or fingered C natural produces a concert Bb. Same as the clarinet, bass Clarinet, trumpet and coronet. An anomaly for me is the 3 valved Euphonium ( Baritone Horn). One can play this instrument as a C instrument in the bass clef, and as a Bb instrument if in treble clef. This was done to make the instrument easy for a player to use the same fingerings as a trumpet. Most orchestral players or wind ensemble players use the bass clef or occasional tenor clef to play. They also normally use a 4 valved version of the instrument ( sounds like 38 and 44 key vs 30 key concertinas to me).

[pastlifeasakite]

never played one, but with all the flats it seems like it would be really fun(if possible) to mess around with balkan tunes. I can wing a couple on the piano acordian(can't do any of them justice) but it would be interesting to hear with single reeds.

[Daniel Hersh]

But why not just build an Eb/Bb in the first place, to avoid the necessity for cross-row playing? And another thing -- why wouldn't someone who wanted to play with Bb instruments have bought a Bb/F concertina rather than an Ab/Eb?

 

I suppose it depends on how you look at it, but by the same token that a C/G Anglo is played in D, then an Ab/Eb is in Bb. They were indeed made for playing in the same keys as brass instruments, mainly for the Salvation Army.

Edited October 8, 2008 by Daniel Hersh

[m3838]

I suppose it depends on how you look at it, but by the same token that a C/G Anglo is played in D, then an Ab/Eb is in Bb. They were indeed made for playing in the same keys as brass instruments, mainly for the Salvation Army.

 

I'm sure C/G Anglo was built to play in C and G, and later, when those Irish tunes shifted to D, C/G was adapted for it.

If Brass instruments were in Bb, accompanying instrument would have been most definitely tuned to Bb to play in the row, how else? I think the tuning of old instruments was done to bring the better sound out of them, not too high, not too low, reeds are not big, nor they are too small. A compromise in size/weight/sound/ response. Relative tuning was just an accident. Just like I read about sax, which went from C to Bb. I think it's for the sound sake. If German music is Bb oriented, why then accordions are tuned to C/F?

And I don't understand the meaning of a phrase: "...tuned to play C scale in the key of A". You mean in just tuning tones octave apart are of different pitch?

[Anglo-Irishman]

I know that a lot of vintage anglos were tuned in Ab/Eb and have

read at several places that such instruments were intented to

play with brass bands. This puzzles me a little bit, because brass

instruments are usually tuned in Bb and Eb.

It would thus make more sense to use a concertina in Eb/Bb,

but these do not seem to exist.

 

Has anybody an explanation for this puzzle ?

 

David,

 

The connection between the concertina and the brass band is, of course, the Salvation Army. In the late 19th century, the standard-issue SA concertina was an Ab/Eb Anglo. Why this was so, is explained in detail in the foreword to an 1888 Salvation Army tutor for concertina accompaniment, which is available online (thanks to Stephen Chambers) at concertina.com (scroll down to "Instructions for salvation Army Concertina" and click on it).

 

Yes, a lot of brass instruments are in Bb and Eb, but remember that brass players are comfortable in keys with more flats than their instrument naturally(!) has, so band arrangements with three or four flats (concert pitch) are common.

 

So the Ab/Eb tuning has nothing to do with earlier and later concert pitches (singers don't notice or care about those two or three Hertz!) and absolutely nothing to do with temperament (equal, mean, or whatever). It's merely a matter of the convenient keys in a given musical environment.

In the folk environment, which is string-oriented, Anglos tend to gravitate towards "sharp" keys (G/D, A/E), because string players, unlike brass players, can play sharps more easily than flats.

 

Cheers,

John

[wntrmute]

The standard concert pitch in the 1800's was about a semitone flatter than it is now. Which would make an A/E instrument then an Ab/Eb instrument now. That flatness would have affected every instrument like, oh to pull an example out of nowhere, trumpets.

Modern concert pitch dates to the 1930's.

In previous centuries concert pitch was several whole tones higher or lower, depending on what decade and what location you are talking about. Fortunately, by the 1800's the Parisian pitch was accepted as the standard by most of Europe in the 1800's which alleviates a lot of this problem. My strong suspicion would be that an instrument from late 1800's or early 1900's that sounds Ab/Eb now was originally tuned in old concert pitch A/E.

The issue of temperment is important, because that answers the question "Why not make everything C? Why have things in Bb, D, or whatever?"

[Anglo-Irishman]

The standard concert pitch in the 1800's was about a semitone flatter than it is now. Which would make an A/E instrument then an Ab/Eb instrument now. That flatness would have affected every instrument like, oh to pull an example out of nowhere, trumpets.

Modern concert pitch dates to the 1930's.

 

I have a Bandoneon dating from c. 1900, still well in tune with itself, but at the old concert pitch of roughly A=435 rather than A=440. The main rows of the Bandoneon are nominally in G, A and E, and these register on my chromatic tuner as a rather flat G, A and E, respectively. Definitely not as a rather sharp F#, G# and D#. So the difference would not make an old A/E sound like a new Ab/Eb.

As you say, the changing concert pitch affected all instruments. The Salvation Army tutor I cited is quite explicit about the SA concertina being "in the main key of Ab concert pitch, that being the key in which most of our tunes are sung". No matter what the concert pitch was in 1888, when the tutor was written, the brass was in the corresponding Bb or Eb, and the concertina was in the corresponding Ab/Eb.

 

Note that, according to the tutor, the Ab/Eb tuning of the concertina was not chosen because of the "home" keys of the brass instruments, but because of the typical keys of the tunes. Brass instruments are in Bb or Eb, i.e. their natural scales have two flats or three flats, respectively. And adding flats is no problem for brass players, but adding naturals and sharps is (say my son and son-in-law, who are both brass players).

The Anglo performs best in its two "home keys" and the keys with one flat more or one sharp more (for the C/G Anglo: C, G, F and D). The home rows of an Ab/Eb Anglo have 4/3 flats, so keys with 2 to 5 flats are comfortable. This gives us the keys of Bb, Eb, Ab, Db - the typical band keys. The key of F (1 flat) would be fingered like the key A on a C/G Anglo.

 

The issue of temperment is important, because that answers the question "Why not make everything C? Why have things in Bb, D, or whatever?"

Because, if everything had to be played in C, some tunes would be too high for the voice or instrument, and some would be too low. European music has used more or less tempered scales since the baroque period, because the just-intonation scales, while sounding very sweet in one key, sound awfully wrong in others. With instruments as modern as the concertina and the valved brass, used in a chromatic environment, equal temperament is more or less given.

You might want to try just temperament in a 20-button Anglo, though. Could sound very sweet - just don't try to play together with modern chromatic instruments! (I'm familiar with this temperament thing from the autoharp community. They can experiment without using a file ...)

 

Cheers,

John

[wntrmute]

[The Salvation Army tutor I cited is quite explicit about the SA concertina being "in the main key of Ab concert pitch, that being the key in which most of our tunes are sung".

Darnit, my ex is right, I am an idiot!

 

Clarinets are in Bb, too.

[Paul Groff]

The standard concert pitch in the 1800's was about a semitone flatter than it is now. Which would make an A/E instrument then an Ab/Eb instrument now. That flatness would have affected every instrument like, oh to pull an example out of nowhere, trumpets.

Modern concert pitch dates to the 1930's.

 

And Anglo-Irishman wrote:

 

European music has used more or less tempered scales since the baroque period, because the just-intonation scales, while sounding very sweet in one key, sound awfully wrong in others. With instruments as modern as the concertina and the valved brass, used in a chromatic environment, equal temperament is more or less given.

You might want to try just temperament in a 20-button Anglo, though. Could sound very sweet - just don't try to play together with modern chromatic instruments! (I'm familiar with this temperament thing from the autoharp community. They can experiment without using a file ...)

 

 

 

Just a couple of responses for wntrmute and Anglo-Irishman,

 

First, it is not true generally that "concert pitch in the 1800s" was flat compared to ours. In the very early 1800s (prior to invention of the concertina) low pitches were common in England and elsewhere. However, as has often been mentioned in these forums, there were several pitch standards used in England from the 1830s to 1930s, and some of these were above our nominal modern western-music standard of A = 440 (that was agreed by convention in 1939 but has certainly not been followed universally even since). Most of the original-tuning London-made concertinas I have studied were made from the 1840s to 1930s and most were tuned around A = 446 to A = 452.5. These pitch standards can also be found in other English-made instruments from the late 19th to early 20th century, and are documented in literature of the day (such as Rockstro's Treatise on the Flute). It is true that many (not all) instruments in the US and continental Europe were pitched below A 440 during this time (one of my ca 1900 piano tuning books -- maybe Fisher - draws attention to the possibility a piano may be "high or low" pitched, and Steinway in the US in the late 1800s evidently used a very high pitch).

 

Second, I have had the opportunity to study quite a few anglo concertinas with reedwork in "time-capsule" condition that were evidently made for the Salvation Army (with SA incorporated in the fretwork, and in some cases [literally] with Salvation Army labels in the cases...). All were in typical, very unequal-tempered anglo concertina tunings. So the inference that instruments as "modern" as concertinas must be equal-tempered may be valid as a personal judgment by Anglo-Irishman, but does not conform to the evidence available to me about how the SA anglos were actually made.

 

Our assumptions based on what we "know" about music and about other instruments should be lightly held so that we can learn something new from the evidence contained in actual instruments and period literature.

 

(edited to add quotes)

Edited October 12, 2008 by Paul Groff

[wntrmute]

If the books say Ab/Eb, then that's what it is. I didn't have a book.

The 'standard' in the 19th cent was kinda sorta the fashion of Paris. But every region, or even part of town, could have it's own standard back then, so there was a great confusion. In some places I've heard tuning forks had A at more than 500Hz, which is quite a bit sharp; so it is hard to generalize.

Baroque electronic tuning equipment was apparently not very user friendly.

Temperment is pretty much an entire field of study in itself. Modern equal temperment is a fairly recent development, though, based as it is on deliberate imperfection. Prior efforts had been geared to perfect temperments that preserved perfect thirds and fifths. There are philosphical and theological factors behind it all.

[Anglo-Irishman]

Just a couple of responses for wntrmute and Anglo-Irishman,

 

...

 

Second, I have had the opportunity to study quite a few anglo concertinas with reedwork in "time-capsule" condition that were evidently made for the Salvation Army (with SA incorporated in the fretwork, and in some cases [literally] with Salvation Army labels in the cases...). All were in typical, very unequal-tempered anglo concertina tunings. So the inference that instruments as "modern" as concertinas must be equal-tempered may be valid as a personal judgment by Anglo-Irishman, but does not conform to the evidence available to me about how the SA anglos were actually made.

 

Our assumptions based on what we "know" about music and about other instruments should be lightly held so that we can learn something new from the evidence contained in actual instruments and period literature.

 

Paul,

 

I have enough trouble learning to play the concertina practically that I haven't got deep into the theory yet.

 

My suggestion that one might try just intonation on a 20-b Anglo was just off the top of my head, and prompted by my autoharping contacts. I didn't know - though it doesn't surprise me - that Anglos have been tuned in unequal temperaments.

I did mention that my 1900 "time-capsule" Bandoneon is in tune with itself. That is, when I play harmonies on it, they sound pleasant and, well, harmonious.

However, on checking its pitch prior to posting to this thread, I did notice that, although most of the notes are uniformly below A=440, SOME of the notes are a few cents lower still. I haven't yet compared the Bandoneon's scales with the just scale (or some kind of partial-comma scale), but it might be interesting.

 

The autoharp connection comes via the chromatic/diatonic dichotomy that both instruments share. Diatonic autoharpists don't just eschew the chromatic scale for their instruments - they go diatonic so as to be able to use just intonation, which does have a sweetness about it with all those strings resonating at the same time. Up to 2 keys a 5th apart (e.g. C/G, G/D, D/A ...) is considered "diatonic". With more keys, you have to start compromising the just intonation.

 

The Anglo, like the Bandoneon and the large German Konzertinas, is also a diatonic instrument. I can quite believe that just intonation or some other non-equal temperament would sound great in "English" style along the rows with full chords (which is how I play).

 

As to the Salvation Army tuning - I haven't got an Army song-book, but I would have the suspicion that the vast majority of tunes would be in Ab or Eb, and relatively few in other keys. Could well be that an Army Eb/Ab in non-equal temperament would sound great accompanying a solo cornet or a corps of Songsters. It might not sound as good played with a full band - but then, you normally wouldn't augment a full band with a concertina .

 

Cheers,

John

[Paul Groff]

If the books say Ab/Eb, then that's what it is. I didn't have a book.

The 'standard' in the 19th cent was kinda sorta the fashion of Paris. But every region, or even part of town, could have it's own standard back then, so there was a great confusion. In some places I've heard tuning forks had A at more than 500Hz, which is quite a bit sharp; so it is hard to generalize.

Baroque electronic tuning equipment was apparently not very user friendly.

Temperment is pretty much an entire field of study in itself. Modern equal temperment is a fairly recent development, though, based as it is on deliberate imperfection. Prior efforts had been geared to perfect temperments that preserved perfect thirds and fifths. There are philosphical and theological factors behind it all.

 

Now you write "it is hard to generalize." My point is that you *did* make a very general statement about "pitch in the 1800s" being "half a step lower" than ours; this was misleading and, in the context of Salvation Army concertinas, in fact just wrong. I have *never* seen a Salvation Army concertina with workshop-original reedwork that was made to a pitch standard lower than A 440. All were higher, usually around A = 452.5

 

I'm not sure what to make of the rest of your post quoted just above but the general issue of pitch standards is not very mysterious. There's plenty of musicological and acoustic literature from England during the period in which concertinas were made documenting the pitches used, plus some surviving instruments in original tuning (harmoniums, wind instruments, etc as well as concertinas), even tuning forks with known provenance have been discussed.

 

My comments on temperament were addressed to John.

 

PG

Edited October 12, 2008 by Paul Groff

[Paul Groff]

Just a couple of responses for wntrmute and Anglo-Irishman,

 

...

 

Second, I have had the opportunity to study quite a few anglo concertinas with reedwork in "time-capsule" condition that were evidently made for the Salvation Army (with SA incorporated in the fretwork, and in some cases [literally] with Salvation Army labels in the cases...). All were in typical, very unequal-tempered anglo concertina tunings. So the inference that instruments as "modern" as concertinas must be equal-tempered may be valid as a personal judgment by Anglo-Irishman, but does not conform to the evidence available to me about how the SA anglos were actually made.

 

Our assumptions based on what we "know" about music and about other instruments should be lightly held so that we can learn something new from the evidence contained in actual instruments and period literature.

 

Paul,

 

I have enough trouble learning to play the concertina practically that I haven't got deep into the theory yet.

 

My suggestion that one might try just intonation on a 20-b Anglo was just off the top of my head, and prompted by my autoharping contacts. I didn't know - though it doesn't surprise me - that Anglos have been tuned in unequal temperaments.

I did mention that my 1900 "time-capsule" Bandoneon is in tune with itself. That is, when I play harmonies on it, they sound pleasant and, well, harmonious.

However, on checking its pitch prior to posting to this thread, I did notice that, although most of the notes are uniformly below A=440, SOME of the notes are a few cents lower still. I haven't yet compared the Bandoneon's scales with the just scale (or some kind of partial-comma scale), but it might be interesting.

 

The autoharp connection comes via the chromatic/diatonic dichotomy that both instruments share. Diatonic autoharpists don't just eschew the chromatic scale for their instruments - they go diatonic so as to be able to use just intonation, which does have a sweetness about it with all those strings resonating at the same time. Up to 2 keys a 5th apart (e.g. C/G, G/D, D/A ...) is considered "diatonic". With more keys, you have to start compromising the just intonation.

 

The Anglo, like the Bandoneon and the large German Konzertinas, is also a diatonic instrument. I can quite believe that just intonation or some other non-equal temperament would sound great in "English" style along the rows with full chords (which is how I play).

 

As to the Salvation Army tuning - I haven't got an Army song-book, but I would have the suspicion that the vast majority of tunes would be in Ab or Eb, and relatively few in other keys. Could well be that an Army Eb/Ab in non-equal temperament would sound great accompanying a solo cornet or a corps of Songsters. It might not sound as good played with a full band - but then, you normally wouldn't augment a full band with a concertina .

 

Cheers,

John

 

There is a great history of beautiful, unequal-tempered intonation used in fine free-reed instruments going back to their Asian ancestors. You might enjoy reading the writings of Bazin, an early 19th century inventor (of the "rocking melodeon" among other free-reed instruments) on how free-reed instruments must be tuned for beautiful (unequal-tempered) harmonies. I know hardly anything about Bandoneons but I would not be surprised to learn the best early ones had carefully crafted, unequal-tempered scales. That is true of the simpler European concertina-family instruments I have had a chance to study. Many German instruments (meant to be played on the continent or exported to the US, perhaps not those for export to the UK) made before 1939 were pitched around A = 435.

 

PG

 

Edited to add:

 

I used to have a copy of a thesis by Dunkel on the evolution of the Bandoneon and related German concertinas. She may have other publications and may discuss the temperaments used.

Edited October 14, 2008 by Paul Groff