Is it possible, however, that this variety of musical tone, the historical roots of which extend back so far, may be something arbitrary and accidental?  The very usage of the German language lends a significant double meaning to the word Stimmung (pitch, tone, mood).  It stamps with the same name, on the one hand, the given basis upon which are built up the harmonies of music and, on the other, the harmonies of emotional life.

It is one of the most fascinating, but at the same time most difficult tasks of the history of culture to catch, as it were, the personal emotions, the pitch upon which each generation is based, in distinction from the perception of the outspoken deeds and thoughts of the age.

This task would be incapable of solution if the history of art did not furnish us a key to it.  I have already shown in the preceding essay on the Eye for Natural Scenery, that the question does not concern the historical appreciation of the work of art as such, so much as the investigation of the special manner in which a generation has perceived and enjoyed the beautiful.  And indeed this is more easily discerned in the case of the most fluid, subjective species of the beautiful, in natural beauty, than in the more objective artistic beauty.

In art, however, musical beauty comes closest to natural beauty, since it is in its turn the most subjective, the most general in its expression, and the most versatile in its forms.  The phenomenon, so important from the point of the history of culture, namely, that each age sees with its own eyes and hears with its own ears, can therefore nowhere be more sharply observed than in the conception of natural beauty and in the fundamental forms of musical expression which happen to prevail for the time being.  I will speak, therefore, of these fundamental forms and not of musical works of art, for by means of what one might call, by way of comparison, musical natural beauty, by means of the prototypes of the high or low tones, of tone-color, of time, of rhythm, etc., we can test most clearly the unconscious transformation of the musical ear in contrast to the conscious development of artistic taste.

Let us compare the orchestral pitch of the eighteenth with that of the nineteenth century.  As the peoples of Europe became more passionate and agitated in public and in private life, and as our whole intellectual life rose to a higher level, our orchestral tone was keyed up higher.  In 1739 Euler reckoned the vibrations of the great eight-foot C to be one hundred and eighteen to the second.  In 1776, Marpurg, for the same tone, gives one hundred and twenty-five vibrations.  Chladni, in the year 1802, calculated its vibrations as a hundred and twenty-eight, twenty years later as a hundred and thirty-six to a hundred and thirty-eight to the second.  And since then we have, no doubt, gone noticeably higher!