I have played drums and guitar for 25 years and never “got into” music theory. I know what sounds good and play that but I never learned the names or theory behind it.
Why is a 5th not 5 notes apart? On a keyboard it’s any where from 4 white keysto 8 total keys? Why is there not uniformity or consistency?
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It has a lot to do with the history of how the notation and keyboard instruments evolved hundreds of years ago.
This is gonna sound odd but it’s the simplest way to understand the concept: They hadn’t invented the other notes yet.
A thousand years ago Western Europe did not have the musical system we all take for granted today. They did not live in a world of absolute pitches or 12 equal divisions of the octave where any instrument can play in any key at any time without preparation. The Circle of Fifths didn’t exist because there was no way to close an entire circle so they thought of music as being on a “Gamut” that roughly matched the range of the human voice and included the notes: A B C D E F G and sometimes this weird lower-sounding version of B they called “soft B” that we now call Bb.
These were basically considered the only “real notes” in music at the time, so when keyboards were invented the white keys were used for the A-G regular notes. However, vocalists in the Medieval period and even more so into the Renaissance used a technique called “Musica Ficta” which was a practice of raising or lowering a note during performance to avoid specific dissonant intervals musicians at the time were taught to avoid. So to be able to accompany vocalists the keyboards needed to be able to play the Fictas, which weren’t thought of as “real” notes. So they added smaller keys onto the keyboard to play notes between notes where Fictas usually were. Because there were no Fictas used between E and F or between B and C, they get no black keys.
So when musicians of the time were originally building all this vocab and language used to describe music, the _oct_ave actually only had 8 notes in it. A 5th actually was 5 notes. It was only hundreds of years later that stuff like D# or Gb actually started being thought of as real notes and not Fictas of D and G.
As a slightly related aside: There was a period of time when fretted instruments couldn’t play in groups with keyboard instruments because the fretted instruments were using early forms of equal temperament intonation while keyboards were using a meantone tuning system that made the pitches between the octaves not line up correctly so C# on a harpsichord was literally a different pitch than C# on lute. The history of this stuff is really quite surprising. The 12-tone equal temperament system we’ve all grown up with wasn’t actually in common use outside of fretted instruments until the 19th century.
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