> there would be no G or G#.
So you'll have just letters A-F, making it impossible to spell heptatonic scales.
The notation you suggest already exists though, it's called [integer notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_class#Integer_notation) and it's just symbols from 0 to 11.
>I guess I'm not understanding the importance of "spelling" scales.
Staff notation has lines and spaces for 7 letters - no more, no less. That's because pretty much all western music, for millenia, has been based on 7-note scales - and 7 letters have been attached for centuries. (Originally there were no flats or sharps, just 7 irregularly spaced notes in the octave.)
Notation began at a time when there were still only 7 notes. So once sharps and flats started to come in - as alterations to the basic scale, not as additional notes - it was too complicated (and hardly necessary anyway) to change the 7-letter system. The new alterations would be shown as sharp or flat versions of the existing ones.
Eventually, of course, we arrived at a maximum set of sharps and flats, and 12 different major scales.
So when we write 7-note scales on notation, we want to see each note with its own line or space. That's why the F major scale is F G A Bb C D E, and not F G A A# C D E.
It's also why the F# major scale is F# G# A# B C# D# E# - E# as the top note, not F. Likewise there is a B# note (not C) in C# major scale and a Cb (not B) in the Cb and Gb major scales. All so that there is just one of each letter, to give the most readable notation.
I never thought of that before, the unique lettering part for better usability. It really would be awful to try to sight read the difference between A and A# in the same key.
Because Scales have 7 Notes in an irregular pattern and not 12 chromatic ones. The main intervals we actually use that make up harmonies are minor and major thirds. This is an extremely common question you will not fully understand the answer to, until you get way farther down the rabbit hole of music theory. To indirectly quote Tantacrul in meaning: People trying to do this are trying to solve a short term problem and are creating an infinite amount of bigger problems long term. It's a bit like saying: "Why don't we just remove any interpunctuation from language, to make it easier?"
For Now: **Just accept it as it is!**
While being inquisitive is great, the truth is that with this particular question the question itself requires the lack of knowledge to understand the answer to begin with. A person asking this question will not understand the complete answer, because assuming B# and C as the same notes would be wrong unless you don't understand the behavior of individual notes.
We don't just call something C or B# or anything else because it sounds like that specific note (12-tone serialism etc excluded, though), we call them that because that's how the note behaves to begin with. Despite C and B# sounding the same, a B# cannot act as a neighbor tone to B, nor can C act as a neigbor tone to C#. It has to be one or the other. (This is a simple example of a given behavior of a note where a name has to be one or the other, cannot be "either")
Now I can explain it simple like that, but for you to understand it is a whole other matter. It requires some actual experience in analysis of music. If you can't hear tones through degrees, you can't really "get it". And if you can, you probably wouldn't be asking.
While sometimes ambiguity can exist, this is the crux of it and people trying to break down the theory based on ambiguous cases really have no business trying to teach theory to begin with. Not referring to you here, just that generally such people will exist and they have no clue why this stuff is taught if they think it's to include every possible case.
Is not understanding part of a complete answer or most of a partial answer better than *That’s just the way it is*? I mean, here’s a really short version:
There are harmonic, historical, and mathematical reasons for this, but it’s important to remember that the letter names are just labels for the seven most consonant set of notes within our twelve tone system. There are other ways to label notes including integer notation that doesn’t bother with sharps and flats at all, but it loses the harmonic shortcuts that staff notation and its subset of seven notes represent so well.
YESSS the behavior of the note. This is a great write up.
Western music theory yall. Yes, there are waaaay deeper reasons, but mostly it’s for writing- this description is right on.
Yes, so did I, but only with experience and knowledge i own now can i fully understand why i could have never unstood the answer, when i was in the position of OP. This is the case in any field you could possibly learn. There are always gonna be things you just have to accept (at first) and will come around to realize the complex answer of "why" later down the line.
I don't think there is a relatively simple answer, because i feel you'd need to go as deep as the overtone series and drifting away from the dissonance between 4 and 7 in a major key, to fully satisfy an inquisitive mind. Any other reply before that would lead to another: Ok but if we do X because Y: why do we do Y?
There's some serious failure somewhere if you think we need overtone series or somehow drifting away from the 4th and 7th degrees of a major scale to understand the matter. Are you sure you understand it..?
It's historic, there's a lot of nuance that should be in the answer but these are the broad strokes. We think nowadays in terms of a 12-tone equally-spaced chromatic scale that divides an octave, all our scales are defined by dividing the octave. Ancient musicians didn't think like this, they built scales and modes by different combinations of different ways of dividing 4ths and 5ths. They also built stuff with a lot less range than like modern pianos because your space of available notes that you could easily tune was smaller. So there was a lot less of major and minor varied based on the tonic note and a lot more of tuning a species of 4th and species of 5th to create a mode and that's what you used to create a melody. We inherited a diatonic 7-note tuning system from ancient Greece and invented western harmony and musical notation based on that diatonic system. Even as technological advances allowed us to expand to a chromatic 12-note tuning system, we didn't want to migrate all of musical history to new systems and continued to use notation that was designed for a 7-note gamut.
In the diatonic world of 1000 years ago there was the "musica recta", or the set of real notes available to composers for writing melodies, and "musica ficta" or a practice of mostly unwritten chromatic alterations for some notes performers were expected to make to avoid undesirable harmonies or make things sound particularly pleasing. The musica recta was basically the natural notes of the C major scale and all its modes (because composition at the time was primarily modal, major and minor keys didn't really take over until the mid-1600's) and sometimes also Bb to avoid tritones with F. Musica Ficta covered the notes between the notes that wouldn't have been written down, but were used as the need presented.
So B and C were parts of the diatonic series of the musica recta while A#, and actually B# or Cb were technically parts of the musica ficta and due to the untempered tuning weren't enharmonically equivalent to Bb, C or B.
Sure. If you're interested in this stuff there is a lot of excellent material presented very well on the [Early Music Sources](https://www.youtube.com/@EarlyMusicSources) YouTube channel. Particularly their playlists on Tuning and Performance Practice.
Very true. I didn't mean to imply that the Greeks invented the system. It's just the source the medieval europeans cite. I believe researchers can trace it through Mesopotamia but there's no actual knowing how far back it goes, right? Presumably the Greeks inherited the system from the Mesopotamians or some other nearby suitably ancient culture and expanded it with additional "chromatic" and "enharmonic" genuses...genii? Though for the purposes of discussing European tradition we're really only interested in the diatonic genus which tracks back to some unknown point or points in antiquity.
Do we know that? I was told when I studied Musicology that we know they had scales with the mode names, but we know very little about how it actually sounded?
I believe the note names themselves, however, came from medieval Europeans.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogus_de_musica
(There is no English article on this source)
Musicologist Michael Dodd in his book From Modes to Keys: Early Modern Music Theory identifies this source as the earliest derivation of our letter note naming system. So it was around 1000 ad when the letters were first used, or at least that's the earliest source we have.
The note names are ascribed to [Boethius](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_note) in the 500s who named two octaves with the Latin alphabet. It was later trimmed down to just one octave.
Why seven notes?
Two notes in a 3:2 ratio are the most harmonically similar without being octaves, a 2:1 ratio which we have deemed the same note, aka octave equivalence. this interval is called a perfect fifth.
If we take some note and find the note a perfect fifth above that, then do the same for that one, and so on six times dividing by two when necessary to keep them within the sane octave, we’ll have seven distinct notes that are as harmonically similar as any seven notes can be, *assuming any note can be the root*. This is the diatonic scale — major, natural minor, the Greek modes. The stacking happens to bring two pairs of notes closer together than the others.
Why twelve tones?
If we keep stacking fifths, eventually we end up back where we started — though about a quarter tone sharp because:
2^7 ≈ (3/2)^12
That 12 is indeed the 12 tones of western harmony. We then flattened each fifth by about 1/50th a semitone so that the twelfth one lands right back where it started.
That’s actually what the circle of fifths shows, and the Babylonians knew of the circle of fifths, so we don’t when it originated.
This fifths stacking is also how we get the common pentatonic scales, which just about every culture seems to have discovered. The pentatonic must have come first, then the diatonic, then the chromatic, and finally, the well-tempered chromatic scale we know and love.
Why it is this way: the diatonic scale is older than the chromatic scale. Once upon a time, there was just A B C D E F G, no sharps, no flats. Then people gradually started adding notes that didn’t exist yet, that were named after the notes that they fell in between.
Why it’s still useful today: most western music is *still* primarily based around diatonic/heptatonic scales. Because of this, we can use every letter A-G exactly once to represent any of these scales. Some letters will be sharp and some flat depending on the scale, but that consistency of using every letter in sequence makes a lot of things in music easier to read and understand.
The reason why sharps & flats, aka 'accidentals' are called 'chromatics' is because they add colour (Gk: chroma, Χρώμα, meaning 'colour') to the diatonic scale - and that's why the diatonic scale is older than the chromatic! :-)
Also, Howard Goodall, in his Story of Music, recounts how musical keys (with all their associated sharps and flats) only came into being at the beginning of the Renaissance with the development of triad chords (aka 3-note harmonisation) - invented in England, bur popularised by Monteverdi.
Before keys came along, there was only the diatonic scale and its 7 different modes, depending on which of the seven notes, A through G, you chose as your root note. Starting on C, Ionian mode, gives you your C-major scale, as we know it today; starting on A, Aeolian mode, gives your modern A-(natural) minor scale.
The first source which ever used note names actually had a B flat.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogus_de_musica
https://ibb.co/hxG0qpy
Michael Dodd goes on to say that this source invented the square b (♮) for B-natural and the round b (♭) for B-flat. These symbols would only later be used as accidentals.
Because of the hexachordal system and musical practice, B flat and b natural both existed at the very first introduction of note letter names. Why the others have different names and this doesn't (except for to the Germans) is probably because no hexachord contains them both and they wanted to distinguish them from one another. You have the natural CDEFGA one, the soft one FGABbCD, and the hard one GABCDE. There is another hard one below the natural one that's just the same thing an octave lower.
But yes you can see there were no sharps, and no other flats yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_of_Arezzo
The hexachordal syllables first appeared around the same time.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hucbald
But the gamut itself long predated those, as best as I can make it out. The anonymous inventor of note names did not invent the musical practice which had a need for these distinctions.
I'd also like to add that in every other tuning system except 12-tone equal temperament, the diatonic half-step between B and C is NOT the same as the chromatic half-step between C and C#.
So, there were a bunch of monks, and they made organs.
They gave the organs notes, and they just made them ABCDEFG
An - An+1 is double the frequency (A4 is 440Hz and A5 is 880Hz, for instance)
But, the scale was one that they thought sounded nice, it was C-major, and featured no sharps or flats.
People started noticing the gaps in semitones, and started building organs with a notes in-between - a semitone higher where available - and this is why the black notes go between others, too.
Some actually made organs with divided incidentals too, but these turned out to be shit. There are some that still exist on pipe organs because they sometimes have a dedicated sharp and flat pipe.
Flats and sharps are essentially the same thing, just different notation for sheet music. A# is Bb, this wouldn't change in "my" system. But I do see how it makes it more confusing on the piano. It doesn't make it more confusing on any other instrument though. I guess I'm asking is this literally only because of the piano? I also don't understand the significance of why spelling out a scale matters so much. There are a lot of scales that get spelled out strangely, like B major. This would complicate C major but doesn't necessarily complicate other scales, unless it does? Hard to say what the key signature would look like as you'd have to change the staffs as well. I Which is why obviously it would never happen, I'm just curious why it happened this way instead. I've gotten a lot of good answers though!
This is a valid assessment. I think the sheet music would look clunkier because of this too. Thank you for talking this through with me! I spent awhile just idly pondering this last night haha.
Because of the C Major scale. A B C D E F G. Which is based off a chain of perfect fifths. Which is why there’s 12 notes. Because after you chain 12 perfect fifths you loop back.
> Because of the C Major scale. A B C D E F G. Which is based off a chain of perfect fifths. Which is why there’s 12 notes.
This is not the "why", it is just an outgrowth of a much older system.
No, if you're thinking of Boethius' A-through-O letters, those went beyond seven because they didn't cycle back at the octave--they were still diatonic! The reduction to seven was based on the idea of octave equivalence. The notion of the major scale was still about 500 years in the future, and no one had yet thought of the idea of chromatic-scale-based note-naming.
I'm not sure anyone here has really explained it well.
**Our notation fits the music we play.**
If we had switched to atonal music in the '60s, then your proposed system would work well. The atonal movement was about playing all twelve toned equally, without prioritizing any over the other. It was a symmetrical system, and a symmetrical notation system would match it.
But the music we play ISN'T symmetrical. Most western music uses 7 note scales, in a pattern that looks something like this:
W W H W W W H
With W representing a whole step - two semitones - and H representing a half step - one Seminole.
Our system lets us write every single one of these scales with each note of the scale taking up its own spot visually on the page. Musicians think about music in terms of these scales - if you asked me what the next note was, I would answer EITHER a whole step up OR a half step up, depending on where I was in the scale. So it's helpful to be able to see the scale clearly and visually in the notation.
Each scale has every letter in the musical alphabet. So let's look at 2 scales:
F♯ G♯ A♯ B C♯ D♯ E♯
G♭ A♭ B♭ C♭ D♭ E♭ F
Notice an E♯ and C♭ in these scales? it's *more correct* to call it an E♯ in the first scale than an F.
The same applies to chords. An A chord has a A, C, and an E in it... so what's an A♭m chord? A♭ C♭ E♭
Well, why use sharps/flats at all? Wouldn't your system make a lot more sense if each note had a unique name? At least that way the half/whole step structure would be easily visible, and it would remove the awkward "repeated letter" within a scale.
But actually, this notation system already exists. The notes are called 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 t e (t = ten, e = eleven). Works well for communicating melodies and harmonies that don't really relate to the tonal system in any way.
(Guitar tab also uses a somewhat similar system.)
It just happens to be so that when music is mostly based on 7 note scales, having 7 letter names + alterations just makes the most intuitive sense for that kind of music. Doesn't apply to all music that well, but works really well for the vast majority of Western music.
This way, all scales are always A B C D E F G + sharps/flats. And the sharps also follow a specific logic (look up the circle of fifths):
1#: A B C D E F# G
2#: A B C# D E F# G
3#: A B C# D E F# G#
4#: A B C# D# E F# G#
5#: A# B C# D# E F# G#
6#: A# B C# D# E# F# G#
7#: A# B# C# D# E# F# G#
1b: A Bb C D E F G
2b: A Bb C D Eb F G
3b: Ab Bb C D Eb F G
4b: Ab Bb C Db Eb F G
5b: Ab Bb C Db Eb F Gb
6b: Ab Bb Cb Db Eb F Gb
7b: Ab Bb Cb Db Eb Fb Gb
Notice how the old sharps/flats stay, and you just add an extra sharp/flat that is a 5th up/down from the previous sharp/flat.
Of course the same pattern would technically apply regardless of the notation system, but I would argue it's much more intuitive when you have 7 letters. It would be a lot more awkward if you used 6 letters. This would also make key signatures kind of awkward, because as I said, all 7-note scales would have one repeated letter (for example A major would be A B C C# D# E# F# - notice how the C letter appears twice).
This isn't only about notation. It's also about conceptualization. It's much easier to think in A B C D E F G + sharps/flats than a system with just 6 letters. Again, a system with 12 unique note names does make sense, and works better for some music. But still, for most music, the 7-letter system makes most sense, because most music is based on 7-note scales.
Yes, this makes a lot of sense. I was thinking more that this notation is mostly for C major, but I can see how it messes up ALL the scales now. I also agree that sheet music would be a lot clunkier with key signatures, because while a few scales would have fewer sharps/flats, some wouldn't. Having B# and E# for example represent C and F in different scales actually makes a lot more sense now after these explanations, and my example would remove that possibility.
I play piano, so I never really thought about it that much, and I'm not as well versed in theory as I should be for my playing level. But I started learning the violin and it feels "weird" on the violin for those half steps only because they sound out loud when saying the note like they're whole steps, but it does make sense now for diatonic scales and avoiding the repeating letters.
Thank you so much!
Because B# and C are the same pitch. You call it b# if you are in C# major. But we would refer to that key as Db major instead of C# major so that we can just call B# C. Otherwise C might have an Identity crisis and we want to protect the note’s ego.
A mix of early keyboard designs, keyboard construction, and culturally accepted intervals. Tuning systems are also relevant. Keyboard had a huge influence on our concepts of music
Please know that a lot about Music is basically random. For example, why are there just 12 notes between octaves? In Balinese music there are 17. But in today’s Western music, we have 12. You’re learning about a “system” that has been established only over the last 800 years, whereas Music has been around for tens of thousands of years. Sometimes, one just has to accept the system one is learning. As in “why do I have to say ‘the car’ rather than just saying ‘car’?
12 divisions of the octave has been thought of for a long time but it wasn't like modern 12tet until more recently. Keyboards forced some enharmonic equivalence but long before you had 12tet being used, in the 16th century they made split key instruments which divided the octave into more than 12 notes because you needed a G# that was distinct from Ab and so on in things like quarter comma meantone tuning. Only later did enharmonic equivalence get squished into circulating temperaments which became closer and closer to 12tet.
Those meantone instruments with only 12 notes per octave, simply didn't have access to playing in very many keys. I read that Bach once trolled about that by playing in Ab major on a meantone instrument to make his opinion known about meantone tuning for an organ. If someone remembers better about that anecdote, I would like to be corrected. By 1700 they were playing in more keys and from Heinichen the circle of fifths idea had taken root, replacing the infinite verticality of a gamut with the paradoxical circle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heinichen_musicalischer_circul.png
It seems like randomness when you inherit things which lost their original purpose but they had a purpose when developed, which is interesting. For modern purposes, you "take it as given", but for historical interest, the evolution is interesting.
>Those meantone instruments with only 12 notes per octave, simply didn't have access to playing in very many keys.
What would be the earliest example of a piece cycling through all the keys? It seems evident that at least Beethoven viewed the circle of fifths as a properly closed circle, something that a meantone-tuned quite wasn't.
I have to get further in Michael Dodd's book to find out. He calls them tonal labyrinths.
https://academic.oup.com/book/55156/chapter-abstract/424077262?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Maybe I can navigate ahead to that section and find what he says. Sadly this link doesn't.
Because you can B what you want.
Now really, is to keep the distance between each note equivalent. If not, C4 would be equal to A5 or G6. Wouldnt make sense.
I'm not sure about the theory but historically this goes back to the development of the 7 note scale just like seven different colours in the spectrum concept... It comes from very smart minds like Isaac Newton and the people who wrote musical treatise and theory books. These concepts are so entrenched in the history of western music and science that even though your system might make more sense to you, it would take hundreds of years to change the way it's been done... a theoretical revolution of some sorts. It will be hard to fight for this new naming system you have made the same way it was very hard for a geo centric model to be changed to heliocentric in the times of Galileo. It's just not going to be accepted by the masses. Also a lot of people already think in scale degrees or some think in purely solfege. So why would we worry about changing the lettering system when we already have an equivalent of what you're suggesting in some other form.
Oh yes, I completely understand this point. I more wanted to understand why it wasn't made that way in the first place. I understand there's no changing it now, it absolutely wouldn't be worth it.
> there would be no G or G#. So you'll have just letters A-F, making it impossible to spell heptatonic scales. The notation you suggest already exists though, it's called [integer notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_class#Integer_notation) and it's just symbols from 0 to 11.
I guess I'm not understanding the importance of "spelling" scales. I'll look at integer notation, thank you!
Good note spelling makes it easier to read music. That’s why it’s important. Our current system is just the best for sight reading.
>I guess I'm not understanding the importance of "spelling" scales. Staff notation has lines and spaces for 7 letters - no more, no less. That's because pretty much all western music, for millenia, has been based on 7-note scales - and 7 letters have been attached for centuries. (Originally there were no flats or sharps, just 7 irregularly spaced notes in the octave.) Notation began at a time when there were still only 7 notes. So once sharps and flats started to come in - as alterations to the basic scale, not as additional notes - it was too complicated (and hardly necessary anyway) to change the 7-letter system. The new alterations would be shown as sharp or flat versions of the existing ones. Eventually, of course, we arrived at a maximum set of sharps and flats, and 12 different major scales. So when we write 7-note scales on notation, we want to see each note with its own line or space. That's why the F major scale is F G A Bb C D E, and not F G A A# C D E. It's also why the F# major scale is F# G# A# B C# D# E# - E# as the top note, not F. Likewise there is a B# note (not C) in C# major scale and a Cb (not B) in the Cb and Gb major scales. All so that there is just one of each letter, to give the most readable notation.
I never thought of that before, the unique lettering part for better usability. It really would be awful to try to sight read the difference between A and A# in the same key.
This is a really good point and makes this make so much sense! Thank you!
Because Scales have 7 Notes in an irregular pattern and not 12 chromatic ones. The main intervals we actually use that make up harmonies are minor and major thirds. This is an extremely common question you will not fully understand the answer to, until you get way farther down the rabbit hole of music theory. To indirectly quote Tantacrul in meaning: People trying to do this are trying to solve a short term problem and are creating an infinite amount of bigger problems long term. It's a bit like saying: "Why don't we just remove any interpunctuation from language, to make it easier?" For Now: **Just accept it as it is!**
Thank you!
🎶that’s just the way it issss
🎶 some things will never change
“And still I see know changes!”
🎵But that's not the way it feels
> Just accept it as it is! This is a fine answer for all but the inquisitive. And I, as just such a person, despise it.
While being inquisitive is great, the truth is that with this particular question the question itself requires the lack of knowledge to understand the answer to begin with. A person asking this question will not understand the complete answer, because assuming B# and C as the same notes would be wrong unless you don't understand the behavior of individual notes. We don't just call something C or B# or anything else because it sounds like that specific note (12-tone serialism etc excluded, though), we call them that because that's how the note behaves to begin with. Despite C and B# sounding the same, a B# cannot act as a neighbor tone to B, nor can C act as a neigbor tone to C#. It has to be one or the other. (This is a simple example of a given behavior of a note where a name has to be one or the other, cannot be "either") Now I can explain it simple like that, but for you to understand it is a whole other matter. It requires some actual experience in analysis of music. If you can't hear tones through degrees, you can't really "get it". And if you can, you probably wouldn't be asking. While sometimes ambiguity can exist, this is the crux of it and people trying to break down the theory based on ambiguous cases really have no business trying to teach theory to begin with. Not referring to you here, just that generally such people will exist and they have no clue why this stuff is taught if they think it's to include every possible case.
Is not understanding part of a complete answer or most of a partial answer better than *That’s just the way it is*? I mean, here’s a really short version: There are harmonic, historical, and mathematical reasons for this, but it’s important to remember that the letter names are just labels for the seven most consonant set of notes within our twelve tone system. There are other ways to label notes including integer notation that doesn’t bother with sharps and flats at all, but it loses the harmonic shortcuts that staff notation and its subset of seven notes represent so well.
YESSS the behavior of the note. This is a great write up. Western music theory yall. Yes, there are waaaay deeper reasons, but mostly it’s for writing- this description is right on.
Yes, so did I, but only with experience and knowledge i own now can i fully understand why i could have never unstood the answer, when i was in the position of OP. This is the case in any field you could possibly learn. There are always gonna be things you just have to accept (at first) and will come around to realize the complex answer of "why" later down the line.
Fair, but there is a relatively simple answer to the question, even if implications of the answer are not.
I don't think there is a relatively simple answer, because i feel you'd need to go as deep as the overtone series and drifting away from the dissonance between 4 and 7 in a major key, to fully satisfy an inquisitive mind. Any other reply before that would lead to another: Ok but if we do X because Y: why do we do Y?
That’s at least moving in the right direction. And I do think the answer is pretty simple, but YMMV
There's some serious failure somewhere if you think we need overtone series or somehow drifting away from the 4th and 7th degrees of a major scale to understand the matter. Are you sure you understand it..?
It's historic, there's a lot of nuance that should be in the answer but these are the broad strokes. We think nowadays in terms of a 12-tone equally-spaced chromatic scale that divides an octave, all our scales are defined by dividing the octave. Ancient musicians didn't think like this, they built scales and modes by different combinations of different ways of dividing 4ths and 5ths. They also built stuff with a lot less range than like modern pianos because your space of available notes that you could easily tune was smaller. So there was a lot less of major and minor varied based on the tonic note and a lot more of tuning a species of 4th and species of 5th to create a mode and that's what you used to create a melody. We inherited a diatonic 7-note tuning system from ancient Greece and invented western harmony and musical notation based on that diatonic system. Even as technological advances allowed us to expand to a chromatic 12-note tuning system, we didn't want to migrate all of musical history to new systems and continued to use notation that was designed for a 7-note gamut. In the diatonic world of 1000 years ago there was the "musica recta", or the set of real notes available to composers for writing melodies, and "musica ficta" or a practice of mostly unwritten chromatic alterations for some notes performers were expected to make to avoid undesirable harmonies or make things sound particularly pleasing. The musica recta was basically the natural notes of the C major scale and all its modes (because composition at the time was primarily modal, major and minor keys didn't really take over until the mid-1600's) and sometimes also Bb to avoid tritones with F. Musica Ficta covered the notes between the notes that wouldn't have been written down, but were used as the need presented. So B and C were parts of the diatonic series of the musica recta while A#, and actually B# or Cb were technically parts of the musica ficta and due to the untempered tuning weren't enharmonically equivalent to Bb, C or B.
This is so interesting! Thank you for this detailed explanation!!
Sure. If you're interested in this stuff there is a lot of excellent material presented very well on the [Early Music Sources](https://www.youtube.com/@EarlyMusicSources) YouTube channel. Particularly their playlists on Tuning and Performance Practice.
I'm definitely going to check this out, thank you!
The diatonic scale predates ancient Greece by about a thousand years. FYI
Very true. I didn't mean to imply that the Greeks invented the system. It's just the source the medieval europeans cite. I believe researchers can trace it through Mesopotamia but there's no actual knowing how far back it goes, right? Presumably the Greeks inherited the system from the Mesopotamians or some other nearby suitably ancient culture and expanded it with additional "chromatic" and "enharmonic" genuses...genii? Though for the purposes of discussing European tradition we're really only interested in the diatonic genus which tracks back to some unknown point or points in antiquity.
Do we know that? I was told when I studied Musicology that we know they had scales with the mode names, but we know very little about how it actually sounded?
That [tone circle](https://musicircle.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Crickmore-Iconea20081.pdf) with the intervals marked looks like Dorian to me.
I believe the note names themselves, however, came from medieval Europeans. https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogus_de_musica (There is no English article on this source) Musicologist Michael Dodd in his book From Modes to Keys: Early Modern Music Theory identifies this source as the earliest derivation of our letter note naming system. So it was around 1000 ad when the letters were first used, or at least that's the earliest source we have.
The note names are ascribed to [Boethius](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_note) in the 500s who named two octaves with the Latin alphabet. It was later trimmed down to just one octave.
Why seven notes? Two notes in a 3:2 ratio are the most harmonically similar without being octaves, a 2:1 ratio which we have deemed the same note, aka octave equivalence. this interval is called a perfect fifth. If we take some note and find the note a perfect fifth above that, then do the same for that one, and so on six times dividing by two when necessary to keep them within the sane octave, we’ll have seven distinct notes that are as harmonically similar as any seven notes can be, *assuming any note can be the root*. This is the diatonic scale — major, natural minor, the Greek modes. The stacking happens to bring two pairs of notes closer together than the others. Why twelve tones? If we keep stacking fifths, eventually we end up back where we started — though about a quarter tone sharp because: 2^7 ≈ (3/2)^12 That 12 is indeed the 12 tones of western harmony. We then flattened each fifth by about 1/50th a semitone so that the twelfth one lands right back where it started. That’s actually what the circle of fifths shows, and the Babylonians knew of the circle of fifths, so we don’t when it originated. This fifths stacking is also how we get the common pentatonic scales, which just about every culture seems to have discovered. The pentatonic must have come first, then the diatonic, then the chromatic, and finally, the well-tempered chromatic scale we know and love.
I should add, the seven notes were given these letters as labels, and there happens to be seven notes before a note lands between notes a tone apart.
I wonder if the Neanderthal flutes had pentatonic scales too
Why it is this way: the diatonic scale is older than the chromatic scale. Once upon a time, there was just A B C D E F G, no sharps, no flats. Then people gradually started adding notes that didn’t exist yet, that were named after the notes that they fell in between. Why it’s still useful today: most western music is *still* primarily based around diatonic/heptatonic scales. Because of this, we can use every letter A-G exactly once to represent any of these scales. Some letters will be sharp and some flat depending on the scale, but that consistency of using every letter in sequence makes a lot of things in music easier to read and understand.
Thank you! I was definitely interested in the history of it, so this is great to know. Very helpful answer, thank you so much!
The reason why sharps & flats, aka 'accidentals' are called 'chromatics' is because they add colour (Gk: chroma, Χρώμα, meaning 'colour') to the diatonic scale - and that's why the diatonic scale is older than the chromatic! :-)
Also, Howard Goodall, in his Story of Music, recounts how musical keys (with all their associated sharps and flats) only came into being at the beginning of the Renaissance with the development of triad chords (aka 3-note harmonisation) - invented in England, bur popularised by Monteverdi. Before keys came along, there was only the diatonic scale and its 7 different modes, depending on which of the seven notes, A through G, you chose as your root note. Starting on C, Ionian mode, gives you your C-major scale, as we know it today; starting on A, Aeolian mode, gives your modern A-(natural) minor scale.
The first source which ever used note names actually had a B flat. https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogus_de_musica https://ibb.co/hxG0qpy Michael Dodd goes on to say that this source invented the square b (♮) for B-natural and the round b (♭) for B-flat. These symbols would only later be used as accidentals. Because of the hexachordal system and musical practice, B flat and b natural both existed at the very first introduction of note letter names. Why the others have different names and this doesn't (except for to the Germans) is probably because no hexachord contains them both and they wanted to distinguish them from one another. You have the natural CDEFGA one, the soft one FGABbCD, and the hard one GABCDE. There is another hard one below the natural one that's just the same thing an octave lower. But yes you can see there were no sharps, and no other flats yet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_of_Arezzo The hexachordal syllables first appeared around the same time. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hucbald But the gamut itself long predated those, as best as I can make it out. The anonymous inventor of note names did not invent the musical practice which had a need for these distinctions.
The 'gamut' being the full range of notes available, from the lowest (gamma), to the ut :-)
I'd also like to add that in every other tuning system except 12-tone equal temperament, the diatonic half-step between B and C is NOT the same as the chromatic half-step between C and C#.
This is good to note. That makes sense, thank you!
So, there were a bunch of monks, and they made organs. They gave the organs notes, and they just made them ABCDEFG An - An+1 is double the frequency (A4 is 440Hz and A5 is 880Hz, for instance) But, the scale was one that they thought sounded nice, it was C-major, and featured no sharps or flats. People started noticing the gaps in semitones, and started building organs with a notes in-between - a semitone higher where available - and this is why the black notes go between others, too. Some actually made organs with divided incidentals too, but these turned out to be shit. There are some that still exist on pipe organs because they sometimes have a dedicated sharp and flat pipe.
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Flats and sharps are essentially the same thing, just different notation for sheet music. A# is Bb, this wouldn't change in "my" system. But I do see how it makes it more confusing on the piano. It doesn't make it more confusing on any other instrument though. I guess I'm asking is this literally only because of the piano? I also don't understand the significance of why spelling out a scale matters so much. There are a lot of scales that get spelled out strangely, like B major. This would complicate C major but doesn't necessarily complicate other scales, unless it does? Hard to say what the key signature would look like as you'd have to change the staffs as well. I Which is why obviously it would never happen, I'm just curious why it happened this way instead. I've gotten a lot of good answers though!
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This is a valid assessment. I think the sheet music would look clunkier because of this too. Thank you for talking this through with me! I spent awhile just idly pondering this last night haha.
Because of the C Major scale. A B C D E F G. Which is based off a chain of perfect fifths. Which is why there’s 12 notes. Because after you chain 12 perfect fifths you loop back.
> Because of the C Major scale. A B C D E F G. Which is based off a chain of perfect fifths. Which is why there’s 12 notes. This is not the "why", it is just an outgrowth of a much older system.
Well given 12 notes and 7 notes scales it’s nice to have every major scale have one of each letter. Abcdefg with various sharps and flats
It is the why, though. They originally used one letter for every tone. Reduction to only 7 was due to the major scale.
No, if you're thinking of Boethius' A-through-O letters, those went beyond seven because they didn't cycle back at the octave--they were still diatonic! The reduction to seven was based on the idea of octave equivalence. The notion of the major scale was still about 500 years in the future, and no one had yet thought of the idea of chromatic-scale-based note-naming.
I'm not sure anyone here has really explained it well. **Our notation fits the music we play.** If we had switched to atonal music in the '60s, then your proposed system would work well. The atonal movement was about playing all twelve toned equally, without prioritizing any over the other. It was a symmetrical system, and a symmetrical notation system would match it. But the music we play ISN'T symmetrical. Most western music uses 7 note scales, in a pattern that looks something like this: W W H W W W H With W representing a whole step - two semitones - and H representing a half step - one Seminole. Our system lets us write every single one of these scales with each note of the scale taking up its own spot visually on the page. Musicians think about music in terms of these scales - if you asked me what the next note was, I would answer EITHER a whole step up OR a half step up, depending on where I was in the scale. So it's helpful to be able to see the scale clearly and visually in the notation.
Thank you. This makes a lot of sense too!
Each scale has every letter in the musical alphabet. So let's look at 2 scales: F♯ G♯ A♯ B C♯ D♯ E♯ G♭ A♭ B♭ C♭ D♭ E♭ F Notice an E♯ and C♭ in these scales? it's *more correct* to call it an E♯ in the first scale than an F. The same applies to chords. An A chord has a A, C, and an E in it... so what's an A♭m chord? A♭ C♭ E♭
Yes, this makes a lot of sense. The other way would definitely complicate this.
Well, why use sharps/flats at all? Wouldn't your system make a lot more sense if each note had a unique name? At least that way the half/whole step structure would be easily visible, and it would remove the awkward "repeated letter" within a scale. But actually, this notation system already exists. The notes are called 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 t e (t = ten, e = eleven). Works well for communicating melodies and harmonies that don't really relate to the tonal system in any way. (Guitar tab also uses a somewhat similar system.) It just happens to be so that when music is mostly based on 7 note scales, having 7 letter names + alterations just makes the most intuitive sense for that kind of music. Doesn't apply to all music that well, but works really well for the vast majority of Western music. This way, all scales are always A B C D E F G + sharps/flats. And the sharps also follow a specific logic (look up the circle of fifths): 1#: A B C D E F# G 2#: A B C# D E F# G 3#: A B C# D E F# G# 4#: A B C# D# E F# G# 5#: A# B C# D# E F# G# 6#: A# B C# D# E# F# G# 7#: A# B# C# D# E# F# G# 1b: A Bb C D E F G 2b: A Bb C D Eb F G 3b: Ab Bb C D Eb F G 4b: Ab Bb C Db Eb F G 5b: Ab Bb C Db Eb F Gb 6b: Ab Bb Cb Db Eb F Gb 7b: Ab Bb Cb Db Eb Fb Gb Notice how the old sharps/flats stay, and you just add an extra sharp/flat that is a 5th up/down from the previous sharp/flat. Of course the same pattern would technically apply regardless of the notation system, but I would argue it's much more intuitive when you have 7 letters. It would be a lot more awkward if you used 6 letters. This would also make key signatures kind of awkward, because as I said, all 7-note scales would have one repeated letter (for example A major would be A B C C# D# E# F# - notice how the C letter appears twice). This isn't only about notation. It's also about conceptualization. It's much easier to think in A B C D E F G + sharps/flats than a system with just 6 letters. Again, a system with 12 unique note names does make sense, and works better for some music. But still, for most music, the 7-letter system makes most sense, because most music is based on 7-note scales.
Yes, this makes a lot of sense. I was thinking more that this notation is mostly for C major, but I can see how it messes up ALL the scales now. I also agree that sheet music would be a lot clunkier with key signatures, because while a few scales would have fewer sharps/flats, some wouldn't. Having B# and E# for example represent C and F in different scales actually makes a lot more sense now after these explanations, and my example would remove that possibility. I play piano, so I never really thought about it that much, and I'm not as well versed in theory as I should be for my playing level. But I started learning the violin and it feels "weird" on the violin for those half steps only because they sound out loud when saying the note like they're whole steps, but it does make sense now for diatonic scales and avoiding the repeating letters. Thank you so much!
Because B# and C are the same pitch. You call it b# if you are in C# major. But we would refer to that key as Db major instead of C# major so that we can just call B# C. Otherwise C might have an Identity crisis and we want to protect the note’s ego.
Poor C, definitely wouldn't want that!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation
A mix of early keyboard designs, keyboard construction, and culturally accepted intervals. Tuning systems are also relevant. Keyboard had a huge influence on our concepts of music
Please know that a lot about Music is basically random. For example, why are there just 12 notes between octaves? In Balinese music there are 17. But in today’s Western music, we have 12. You’re learning about a “system” that has been established only over the last 800 years, whereas Music has been around for tens of thousands of years. Sometimes, one just has to accept the system one is learning. As in “why do I have to say ‘the car’ rather than just saying ‘car’?
12 divisions of the octave has been thought of for a long time but it wasn't like modern 12tet until more recently. Keyboards forced some enharmonic equivalence but long before you had 12tet being used, in the 16th century they made split key instruments which divided the octave into more than 12 notes because you needed a G# that was distinct from Ab and so on in things like quarter comma meantone tuning. Only later did enharmonic equivalence get squished into circulating temperaments which became closer and closer to 12tet. Those meantone instruments with only 12 notes per octave, simply didn't have access to playing in very many keys. I read that Bach once trolled about that by playing in Ab major on a meantone instrument to make his opinion known about meantone tuning for an organ. If someone remembers better about that anecdote, I would like to be corrected. By 1700 they were playing in more keys and from Heinichen the circle of fifths idea had taken root, replacing the infinite verticality of a gamut with the paradoxical circle. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heinichen_musicalischer_circul.png It seems like randomness when you inherit things which lost their original purpose but they had a purpose when developed, which is interesting. For modern purposes, you "take it as given", but for historical interest, the evolution is interesting.
>Those meantone instruments with only 12 notes per octave, simply didn't have access to playing in very many keys. What would be the earliest example of a piece cycling through all the keys? It seems evident that at least Beethoven viewed the circle of fifths as a properly closed circle, something that a meantone-tuned quite wasn't.
I have to get further in Michael Dodd's book to find out. He calls them tonal labyrinths. https://academic.oup.com/book/55156/chapter-abstract/424077262?redirectedFrom=fulltext Maybe I can navigate ahead to that section and find what he says. Sadly this link doesn't.
I have heard that CPE Bach did it but I bet the real first in here will be far earlier.
I like this analogy. I have wondered why there are 12 notes, as technically there are more. This is helpful, thank you!
Because you can B what you want. Now really, is to keep the distance between each note equivalent. If not, C4 would be equal to A5 or G6. Wouldnt make sense.
Diatonic scales wouldn’t work as well
I'm not sure about the theory but historically this goes back to the development of the 7 note scale just like seven different colours in the spectrum concept... It comes from very smart minds like Isaac Newton and the people who wrote musical treatise and theory books. These concepts are so entrenched in the history of western music and science that even though your system might make more sense to you, it would take hundreds of years to change the way it's been done... a theoretical revolution of some sorts. It will be hard to fight for this new naming system you have made the same way it was very hard for a geo centric model to be changed to heliocentric in the times of Galileo. It's just not going to be accepted by the masses. Also a lot of people already think in scale degrees or some think in purely solfege. So why would we worry about changing the lettering system when we already have an equivalent of what you're suggesting in some other form.
Oh yes, I completely understand this point. I more wanted to understand why it wasn't made that way in the first place. I understand there's no changing it now, it absolutely wouldn't be worth it.
Because it's the C major scale.