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‘OF THE TEMPERAMENT OF THOSE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS’: CONSIDERING TIBERIUS CAVALLO AND THE SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION OF MUSICAL SOUNDS IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2018
Extract
The connection of music to scientific exploration in late Enlightenment London can be considered from various perspectives, perhaps most evidently through the binary of amateur–professional. These two realms intersected within natural philosophical observation, a practice that often served concurrently as entertainment and as study. The development of scientific instruments for the observation of various phenomena appeared in both professional and amateur contexts, contributing to technological growth and research. Natural philosopher Tiberius Cavallo (1749–1809) and his 1788 article on musical temperament (‘Of the Temperament of Those Musical Instruments, in Which the Tones, Keys, or Frets, are Fixed, as in the Harpsichord, Organ, Guitar, &c’) provide a captivating example of amateur interest overlapping effectively with the professional domain; as an amateur musician and professional scientist, Cavallo observed equal temperament in both mathematical and aesthetic terms. Consideration of his work promotes a more nuanced view of London as a place where scientific and musical ideas could meet and be ‘instrumentalized’, emphasizing the city's status as a vibrant arena for the interaction of scientific exploration, artistic endeavour and professional identities. In this sense, Cavallo's work on temperament was not merely a scientific activity; it reflected technological change during a stimulating period of scientific and musical progress in late eighteenth-century London. For example, instrument builders were actively developing ways to improve pitch control and tuning stability, as witnessed by numerous British patents for harp mechanisms, the addition of flute keys and keyboard construction.
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References
1 Cavallo, Tiberius, ‘Of the Temperament of Those Musical Instruments, in Which the Tones, Keys, or Frets, are Fixed, as in the Harpsichord, Organ, Guitar, &c’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 78 (1788), 238–254 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See Patents for Inventions: Abridgments of Specifications Relating to Music and Musical Instruments: A. D. 1618–1866, second edition (London: George Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1871).
3 Davies, James and Lockhart, Ellen, ‘Introduction: Fantasies of Total Description’, in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London 1789–1851, ed. Davies, and Lockhart, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 William Herschel (1738–1822) is credited with discovering Uranus in 1781 and was active as a composer and musician in the north of England and later in Bath. His sister Caroline (1750–1848) worked with her brother in music and astronomy and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1828. See Lubbock, Constance Ann, The Herschel Chronicle: The Life-Story of William Herschel and His Sister, Caroline Herschel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933)Google Scholar.
5 Emily I. Dolan, ‘Music as an Object of Natural History’, in Sound Knowledge, ed. Davies and Lockhart, 33.
6 Bertucci, Paola, ‘Cavallo, Tiberius (1749–1809)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Matthew, H. C. G. and Harrison, Brian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; online edition, ed. David Cannadine, www.oxforddnb.com.
7 Cavallo, Tiberius, A Complete Treatise on Electricity, in Theory and Practice: with Original Experiments (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1777)Google Scholar, An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Medical Electricity (London: author, 1781) and A Treatise on Magnetism, in Theory and Practice (London: author, 1787).
8 Bertucci, ‘Cavallo’. See also Hudson, James, Report on the Adjudication of the Copley, Rumford, and Royal Medals: And Appointment of the Bakerian, Croonian, and Fairchild Lectures (London: Taylor, 1834), 36 Google Scholar.
9 Cavallo, Tiberius, The Elements of Natural Or Experimental Philosophy, four volumes (London: Cadell and Davies, 1803)Google Scholar. On the musical ‘rage’, which was reflected in a surge in subscription concerts, music publishing and instrument sales, see McFarlane, Meredith and McVeigh, Simon, ‘The String Quartet in London Concert Life, 1769–1799’, in Wollenberg, Susan and McVeigh, Simon, eds, Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 165 Google Scholar.
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14 Scottish piano builder John Broadwood has been associated with Cavallo and Gray in the study of striking-point on grand keyboard instruments during the 1780s. See Wainwright, David, Broadwood by Appointment: A History (London: Quiller, 1982)Google Scholar, and Koster, John, ‘The Divided Bridge, Due Tension, and Rational Striking Point in Early Grand Pianos’, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society 23 (1997), 5–55 Google Scholar.
15 Sébastien Érard, British patent No. 2016, 17 October 1794: ‘Improvements in the construction of harps and pianofortes, both large and small, and which improvements may also be applied to all kinds of instruments where keys are used’. This patent includes a mechanism for ‘forming’ semitones on the harp: ‘it [the mechanism] presses the strings so as to reduce the length of the vibrating surface’. Patents for Inventions, 28. Richard Potter, British patent No. 1499, 28 October 1785: ‘An improvement upon the musical instrument commonly called the German flute’, describes construction details to ‘tune the flute with other instruments’. Patents for Inventions, 16.
16 Cavallo's lengthy and at times overly simplistic discussions ‘Of Sound, or of Acoustics’ and ‘Of Musical Sounds’ in the second volume of The Elements of Natural or Experimental Philosophy repeat some of the material discussed in the article.
17 Cavallo, ‘Of the Temperament’, 254. Unfortunately, Cavallo does not describe the mechanism used to activate the string on his monochord. This was probably a plucking-type action with jack and lever, similar to that of the Wardhaugh Thompson monochord patented in 1787 and sold by Longman & Broderip. See MacKenzie, Alexander and Mobbs, Kenneth, ‘The Musical Enigma of Longman and Broderip's Monochord, c. 1790’, The Galpin Society Journal 57 (2004), 46–52 and 206–207Google Scholar.
18 Paraphrased from Cavallo, ‘Of the Temperament’, 241–242.
19 Cavallo, ‘Of the Temperament’, 238–239.
20 It is not practical to use a single-string gauge throughout a keyboard instrument's compass because of the excessive length of the bass strings and resulting timbral problems. The string length would have to be doubled for each octave in descent, resulting in unmanageably long bass strings that could touch neighbouring strings when activated.
21 Cavallo, ‘Of the Temperament’, 239–240.
22 Cavallo, ‘Of the Temperament’, 254. The meaning of ‘E natural’ is somewhat unclear, although it is likely that this denotes E major, as opposed to E flat major. The ‘usual manner’ of tuning would be a variation of meantone temperament, such as the 1799 tuning recipes of Thomas Young. See Young's ‘Outlines of Experiments and Inquiries Respecting Sound and Light’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 90 (1800), 145–146.
23 Cavallo, ‘Of the Temperament’, 243.
24 Cavallo, ‘Of the Temperament’, 248.
25 Cavallo, ‘Of the Temperament’, 252.