Some Notes on Tuning Up

For more than three decades, the undergraduate textbook Worlds of Music has introduced students to the idea of the music-culture with a story about orchestral tuning up. Stumbling across a version of that story from the late nineteenth century, I embarked on an exploration of the social circulation of this anecdote. Although I did not find a replica of the narrative as it appears in Worlds of Music, I was nonetheless able to discover its links to three European visits made by the shah of Persia Nasir al-Din, as well as a fourth about Giuseppe Donizetti, who was court musician to the Sultan Mahmoud II. Moreover, exploring the circulation of these narratives revealed metadiscursive affordances that lead to an ongoing discussion of tuning up and its place within the European high art tradition.