Useless facts you never really wanted to know, but..........

Ah, yes, the H and the B.

Weeeeeeell, the original Germanic script used two forms of B - the B- quadratum and the B-rotundum. The B-quadratum was what was used for the natural note "B" and was very similar in appearance to the Germanic "H". A monk was said to have made a mistake, whilst transcribing a piece of music and written an "H" instead of the B-quadratum. The rest is history, as they say.
The B-rotundum was what was used for the note one semitone lower than B-quadratum and which has devloped into the note "B", which is our B flat. The B-rotundum is still used today, we just use this character to denote any flatted note - it's the funny rounded "b" that's our flat sign.

Anyone else got any totally useless musical knowledge?

not that i can think of

I have an old girl friend that is full of totally useless knowledge. Does that count..lol

Joe

Does it seem odd that C major is our "home" scale in Western music, with all the white notes on keyboards? Wouldn't it have been more logical to call that scale's root note A? Well, when the letter note system was first adopted, the minor scale was the main thing in church music, and A was picked as the starting point for the main one. When the Ionian mode or major scale took over, the one corresponding to A minor, or C major, was the main one.

Hmmmmm....maybe useless, but fascinating none the less.... I really have got to start learning some theory!!!!!

:D :D :D

Vic

Well, that sounds nice... but it ain't so.

The Greeks were the first to attempt to write down pitch - and they did it with letters. Greek instruments had a range of roughy two octaves, and they assigned a different letter to each note, using 15 different letters to cover a two-octave range. The Romans continued this practice.

Boethius, at the end of the Roman era (early 6th century) picked up on this... but he was also aware of octave relationships. His system used A-G for the lower octave, and a-g for the upper octave.

The first attempts to write out pitches as notes instead of letters were by placing dots over the words in Latin texts - the higher the dot above the text, the higher the pitch. Not exact, but pretty close, and serviceable if you'd heard the tune before... kinda like tab for Gregorian chant. That sort of notation is called neume notation... and the notes didn't have letter names.

A few monks decided to improve on this by drawing a horizontal line, and arranging pitches in reference to that line. By the early 11th century, there were a LOT of chants - every day had different ones used in the mass, so remembering the thousands of chants wasn't workable anymore without a fixed pitch system. A monk named Guido d'Arezzo decided to use more than one line.

Now, some tunes were higher than others, and the idea of ledger lines wasn't around yet, so all notes were placed on Guido's four-line staff... big enough to handle an octave, the usual range of a chant. Consequently, two tunes that differed in pitch might be written exactly the same way.

All the church music was in Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, or Mixolydian. If you write those out as lines, you've got D-F-A-C, E-G-B-F, F-A-C-E, and G-B-D-F. No matter what mode you're in, one line is F - so Guido made that line red. The line didn't signify the pitch F yet - it was simply the pitch common to whatever mode you were in.

The do-re-mi system is also credited to Guido - it's from his transcription of the hymn to St. John (That's actually a J in Sancte Johannes, but gothic Is and Js looked a lot alike), and he used it to teach pitches in a system called solfege that's still around today. There's some doubt on whether it's true though - the syllables do-re-mi etc. bear more than passing resemblance to the first seven letters of the Arabic alphabet, and a lot of Arab knowledge was spreading to Europe at around the time of Guido.

At any rate, Guido did teach using ut-re-mi. Since ut was the starting tone, he decided another colored line was called for, and he used green or yellow to note this pitch - it would be on a line in Dorian or Phrygian mode chants. So Guido didn't have the association of ut = C or la = F; he was just trying to write things down.

Other monks in other places tried different things. Odo, the abbot of Cluny in the tenth century, was using letters for pitch, using the A-G that Boethius had written about. A wasn't our A though - it was the lowest string on an instrument he used called a monochord. If 'A' was written above a word at the Cluny monastery, you'd pluck the 'A' string on the monochord and sing the word to that pitch.

Music didn't get around much in those days. Since a single text may take days to transcribe, the pieces the monks wrote out tended to stay in their abbeys. So we've got letters in Cluny (France) and lines/syllables in Arezzo (Italy). One had little to do with the other.

Fast forward about four hundred years, and you've got three things that happen at pretty close to the same time: paper is invented, so you don't have to write on hide parchments anymore; Gutenberg invents a printing press; and music becomes a lot more polyphonic. You now need to write for more than one voice range. Ottaviano Petrucci took advantage of these things to become the first music publisher, with a set of books for voice called "Harmonice musices odhecaton" published around 1501 (the first music books set with moveable type!). In this set of books he introduced alto and bass clefs, building on Guido's work.

A hundred years later, another line was added to the staff to accomodate the growing instrumental music, and keyboards demanded two staves... and the note in the middle of the keyboard happened to be C. It was convenient to put that between the staves, and we end up with middle C as a reference point.

So yeah, A originally came from the lowest tone back in Greece. Which tone ended up as the standard for A took a couple thousand years to decide... and in the end, it was decided by early keyboards like the virginal.