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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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.
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