Why did musicians decide middle C should be labeled C and not A?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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