There had been efforts throughout the 19th c. to come up with a standard concert pich. That pitch had been pretty variable, and as musical instruments were a part of international trade, the variability was awkward : a violin can be tuned slightly flat or sharp, but woodwinds and brass instruments are much less flexible, so someone with a flute at A= 429Hz would have trouble joining band playing at A= 435Hz. It was therefore very handy for instrument manufacturers to have a universal standard (just as it was also recently quite handy for cell phone makers to have the standard USB connector). In 1859 the French government deposited a tuning fork at the National Conservatory at A=435 Hz, to be the French standard ( maybe this could have been expected from the country that also owned the kilogram). Queen Victoria announced that her own music bands would use this standard in 1885, and later that year in Vienna, a conference was held to choose a standard pitch. Italy, Austria ,Hungary, Russia, Saxony, Sweden and Wuertemburg signed on to A=435Hz. By the end of the 19th c. , that had pretty much become standard pitch in Europe and the US.

As for the Versailles Treaty, the standard pitch convention was listed with a lot of other previous multilateral treaties, conventions, and economic or technical agreements. These had previously been signed, but the Versailles Treaty and above Treaties were taking apart and re-working a lot of German, Austrian, Bulgarian and Turkish territory and government. That section 282.22 was stating that, despite all that re-arrangement, those previous agreements between all those countries were all nonetheless still in effect. Why Bulgaria and Turkey did not get included in this, I am not sure- but I would suspect that they likely did not sign onto the original 1885 agreements, and so were not bound by them.

Jerry L. Weinstein, Musical Pitch and International Agreement

The American Journal of International Law

Vol. 46, No. 2 (Apr., 1952), pp. 341-343

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