So the C scale is sort of the “first” scale because it has no sharps or flats. Middle C is an important note on pianos. So why didn’t it get the first letter of the alphabet? While we are at it, where did these letter names even come from?
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The short answer is that our letter based naming conventions were invented by medieval monks who tended to chant prayers in a minor key. If you start at a and play a scale of only white notes you’ll get the minor scale. Much later on, playing music in a major key became the norm and c became much more important as the c major scale uses the same notes as a minor
Edit: I know this is not entirely accurate, it is a simplification and how I would answer this question if asked by a five year old; all models are wrong but some models are useful. I chose not to get into the history of modal music because the more familiar distinction of major vs minor scales illustrates the concept. Similarly, I understand that early music was more varied than my post suggests but a full accounting of the convoluted history of why we practice and talk about music the way we do doesn’t seem appropriate for this sub.
When the 7 notes of the western scale were named, the “standard” scale was A B C D E F G. What we now call the natural minor scale, or the *Aeolian Mode*
Composers in this period, medieval Europe, didn’t have the sharps and flats. So to gain access to different harmonies they used used *modes*. Modes are the same 7 notes, but you start on a different note. The third mode of this scale is called the *Ionian Mode* and starts on C and goes through all the notes C D E F G A B.
During the classical music period, this became the mainstream scale for music. Music notation was invented and based around this mode. So now we think of the Natural minor as starting on the ~~5th~~ 6th note of the major scale. When really the Ionian Mode is the third mode of the Aeolian Mode.
In reality they are all just frequencies and there is no more or less *correct* notes. The music notation system is made up by us, and we could change it.
As an aside:
* A minor is all white keys too
* He question may be language specific: in French we don’t use letters to name notes and the typical starting point is C (*do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si*)
One thing to point out is that the letter names you are using are whats used in English(and a few other languages as well) but note names are not always called A B C etc. The Modern system evolved from the Solfege system and was developed around 1000 years ago. In eleventh-century Italy, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo invented a notational system that named the six notes of the hexachord after the first syllable of each line of the Latin hymn “Ut queant laxis”, the “Hymn to St. John the Baptist”, yielding ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. later “Ut” was changed in the 1600s in Italy to the open syllable Do. a 7th note was added later as well. As the fixed “Do” system evolved, Do was C in the hymn. The moveable Do system began to appear in some countries around the same time and the note names were changed to alphabetical ones. In Movable do or tonic sol-fa, each syllable corresponds to a scale degree. This is analogous to the Guidonian practice of giving each degree of the hexachord a solfège name, and is mostly used in Germanic countries, Commonwealth countries, and the United States.
As an engineer with some background in signal processing, music theory drives me nuts! Notes are just frequencies and the division is largely artificial. Octaves make sense — a doubling of frequency, but the division of octaves into 8 unequal notes just feels unexplainable.
I gather it is what the western world has gotten used to, so now it is set in stone and unchangeable. Our ears are used to it, and different divisions and note combinations just feel weird. We’ve come to the point that we develop entire theories and stories about why they are correct — i.e. music theory.
**ETA:** you all have confirmed that musicians are as opinionated as engineers and double down as to what is “correct”. While there are measureable mathematical parts of music I really believe that it is far more complex and artistic than can be readily explained by the math. By accepting it as Art rather than Science, I think it allows one to be far more open and enjoy the incredible expressions of sound that just can’t be adequately explained mathematically.
If you break an oil painting down into the chemical composition of of the paint you have something scientific. If you break music down into measurable frequencies, you have math. In neither of those cases can it come near to encompassing the beauty that is made that is beyond the math and science.
There is a lot of misinformation on this thread, and the real answer is very unsatisfying.
I once spoke to my music history professor about exactly this question at length. It seemed odd to me that most of Europe started on Do, and that that note corresponded to C in the English/Germanic system. His specialization was in medieval and pre-medieval music, so I have little reason to doubt what he told me. I will add the small caveat that this conversation was years ago, so I will go ahead and ascribe any errors to my own poor memory instead of to the good professor.
What I came out of that conversation with was:
1) the A B C system predates the solfege (ut re mi) by literally hundreds of years, so there is no derivation whereby the A B C people simply diverged from the do re mi people to emphasize a different scale.
2) the A B C system also predates anything we’d consider modal scales by hundreds of years, so we can’t use aeolian or ionian to figure this out.
3) the reason C is matched to Do in most systems instead of A is simply lost to history. If I recall correctly, we’re looking somewhere around 500-700 AD when the A B C system emerged, and there is truly very little to go on. There weren’t uniformly fashioned keyboards yet, and everything was pitched differently from one church to the next, so it’s very hard to fathom how it actually got to where it did.
I hate this answer, but there are good odds that it’s truly as good as we’re going to get.
The letters originally came from Greek. In Greek music theory, there were originally four modes, roughly corresponding with our modern Dorian (starts on D), Phrygian (starts on E), Lydian (F), and Mixolydian (G). There were no sharps or flats. There were also four “hypo” modes (Hypodorian, etc.) that used the same tonic (“home note”) as their corresponding non-hypo modes, but ran from a fourth down to a fifth up. So hypodorian was A to A, all white keys, but with the tonic on D. In this system, A (“alpha”) was the lowest note available.
As others have pointed out, this system stopped being used for a long time after the fall of classical Greek civilization. In the middle of the middle ages, around 900-1100 AD, various Europeans began to redevelop systems of notation and note naming. Initially they used the syllables of the first lines of the chant “Ut queant laxis”, giving us “Ut re mi fa sol la”. Eventually (like way later, I believe in the 19th century) ut was changed to do and the modern solfege system was developed. It wasn’t until a bit later, when more modes started to be added, that theorists in certain regions began reviving the Greek letter name system.
Because the notes all had names before the piano, or any other modern instrument for that matter was named.
Also middle C is not in the exact middle of the piano. Middle C is comes from the double staff, staking a treble clef on top of a bass clef, between these two clefs lands middle C.
The reason these two clefs are used to make the double staff is basically just because they were and continue to be incredibly popular clefs for a great variety of instruments.
It’s also worth mentioning that all these notes probably had names and an oral tradition before anyone decided to start writing things down in sheet music.
Your question is kind of like asking “why did English speakers decide to have three different commonly used words all said as ‘their'” it’s not a decision that was made, it just kinda happened that way.
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