Because when they decided to name the notes with letters, they took a minor scale and named the notes "naturally": A, B, C, D, E, F, G. This is what we know as the A minor scale. Therefore the choice of names was accidental - it just happened that they considered a minor scale instead of a major one.
Now if we want to use the same "natural" notes in a major scale, then we need to start with C. If, however, we were to turn back time and influence the early notation to use a major scale as a basis, then they would name "A" the first note in the natural major scale, and then today we would talk about A major as the "standard" scale.
But of course this "alternate" A would be the same frequency as "our reality" C. I don't think it was accidental that first mode is A minor. Rather, it represents the music of the people that created music notation: Monks. An 'Aeolian-like' sound was the their preferred mode of music making. The notes of that "Aeoloian-like" sound would have been a minor scale. That is the sound they liked to sing- and the first note of it they named 'A'.
Over the course of time there was a shift brought about by the development of the tempered scale, as well the development of craftsmen skilled in tuning instruments, which made it possible for Bach to write his music dig The Well Tempered Clavier.
Bach is really the beginning of modern music and, in a way, modern consciousness. When we ponder the key of C on the piano and wonder why it's not called A, it's because we don't perceive the bias we have for the major scale. It's become part of the foundation of Western consciousness. In my humble opinion The really curious thing is how C has become the octave starter, with B3 preceding C4 in scale or, in other notation, b preceding c'.
So obviously when a standard for octave notation was added to the note name system, C had already replaced A as the notation baseline. That C has become "middle C" and thus a prominent notation center in piano literature is also a later development since the earlier collection of clefs was much more diverse than the current main system of violin clef and bass clef and there were several other notation systems for what amounted to organ notation before the current middle-C centric system that is now the basis for piano notation became the standard.
To add to all the answers and to summarize , the names weren't thought from English, not even from an alphabet but a religious text. English names were way too later as far as I know , so even if romance languages and English and some other maybe have "ABCDEFG" as the first letters in their alphabet, Guido d'Arezzo didn't think about the alphabet in the first place. The theory that the Minor Scale starts with the letter A is plausible. However, has anyone thought of the fact that on a piano C is just the middle key which we refer to as "Middle C" on the keyboard--half the notes are above it and half are below.
It has nothing to do with Major or Minor key signatures. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why is C the base note of standard notation and keys? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 5 months ago.
Active 9 months ago. Viewed 40k times. Improve this question. Cart before the horse, Lu. Do is C because C is the base note. In a parallel quirk of history, the first drive on a Windows computer is usually C: rather than A:. A different reason of course but in both cases, it is too hard to change now and we live with the situation. The first floppy drive was A:. When there was only one, it could be remapped as B: for disk copying.
When hard drives appeared the first one was C:. Though some ingenious justifications have been suggested, I don't think we're going to get a better answer than 'because it is'. Show 1 more comment. Active Oldest Votes. So it's historical accident that C major is treated as "basic.
Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. In other words, it's not that "C" was given any prominence directly as the "base note" but rather the Ionian became the "base mode". The latter names themselves favour the Aeolian as the "base mode". JamesTauber but the Aeolian mode was also invented at the same time as the Ionian, in the middle of the 16th century , and has nothing to do with the assignment of letter names to the notes, which had happened over 5 centuries earlier.
Add a comment. The Importance of C, F, and G as the Lowest Note of Hexachords Over the centuries, other notes in the musical scale also began to assume some importance.
The Twelve-Mode System and C as a "Legitimate" Final The hexachordal system was the foundational system for learning how to sing for over half a millennium. He argued that this particular division of the octave was therefore the most "natural.
As mentioned above, C, F, and G were all used to begin hexachords. The shape of our modern flat and natural signs derives from the rounded and square shapes of the "soft" and "hard" Bs. The C-based hexachord was natural because it avoided all of this problem of choosing a B. It just had the notes C-D-E-F-G-A and thus had a kind of superiority relating in some ways to notions of ratios and harmonic number relating to the scale as well.
All of the modal finals could be arranged in ascending order within the Guidonian hexachord based on C, i. Recall that the original primus mode began on D simply because it was the lowest among the four original finals of D-E-F-G.
Rather than having a gap and skipping over B, as Glarean's mode system did with D-E-F-G-A-C, Zarlino recognized the simplicity of a system that simply walked up the scale with the numbered modes. A related but somewhat more technical point had to do with the arrangement of "species" of octave, i. Placing C first also allowed cycling through the various octave species that tended to be enumerated in music theory treatises of the time without interruption.
Even better, the actual six finals of the mode in order would now make up their own uninterrupted diatonic hexachord in order: C-D-E-F-G-A i. This served to tie Zarlino's system into the authority of Guido's hexachordal system in a rather fundamental and intuitive way.
Lastly, Zarlino was sensitive to the fact that ancient Greek place name terms like "Dorian" and "Phrygian" had been mistakenly mapped onto the medieval modal system. For example, the first mode was called "Dorian," but the ancient Greek conception of Dorian was actually closer to the intervals of what we'd call a Phrygian scale.
Medieval music theory was often based on misunderstandings and mistranslations built on top of other misunderstandings. The keyboard is great for helping you develop a visual, aural, and tactile understanding of music theory. On the illustration below, the pitch-class letter names are written on the keyboard. Notice that some of the keys have two names. When two pitch classes share a key on the keyboard, they are said to have enharmonic equivalence.
When specifying a particular pitch precisely, we also need to know the register. Instead they sing notes that are exactly double the frequency that the men are singing. That means their note has exactly two waves for each one wave that the men's note has. These two frequencies fit so well together that it sounds like the women are singing the same notes as the men, in the same key.
They are just singing them one octave higher. Any note that is twice the frequency of another note is one octave higher. Notes that are one octave apart are so closely related to each other that musicians give them the same name. A note that is an octave higher or lower than a note named "C natural" will also be named "C natural".
A note that is one or more octaves higher or lower than an "F sharp" will also be an "F sharp". The notes in different octaves are so closely related that when musicians talk about a note, a "G" for example, it often doesn't matter which G they are talking about.
We can talk about the "F sharp" in a G major scale without mentioning which octave the scale or the F sharp are in, because the scale is the same in every octave. Because of this, many discussions of music theory don't bother naming octaves. Informally, musicians often speak of "the B on the staff" or the "A above the staff", if it's clear which staff they're talking about.
But there are also two formal systems for naming the notes in a particular octave. Many musicians use Helmholtz notation. Others prefer scientific pitch notation , which simply labels the octaves with numbers, starting with C1 for the lowest C on a full-sized keyboard. Figure 3 shows the names of the octaves most commonly used in music. The octave below contra can be labelled CCC or Co; higher octaves can be labelled with higher numbers or more lines. Octaves are named from one C to the next higher C.
For example, all the notes between "great C" and "small C" are "great". One-line c is also often called "middle C".
No other notes are called "middle", only the C. Exercise 4. Go to Solution. The word "octave" comes from a Latin root meaning "eight".
It seems an odd name for a frequency that is two times, not eight times, higher. The octave was named by musicians who were more interested in how octaves are divided into scales, than in how their frequencies are related. Octaves aren't the only notes that sound good together. The people in different musical traditions have different ideas about what notes they think sound best together. In the Western musical tradition - which includes most familiar music from Europe and the Americas - the octave is divided up into twelve equally spaced notes.
If you play all twelve of these notes within one octave you are playing a chromatic scale. Other musical traditions - traditional Chinese music for example - have divided the octave differently and so they use different scales.
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