I’ve tried many times to learn how to read music and have never gotten far. One of the biggest obstacles has been the apparent inconsistency in the frames of reference used simultaneously.
The notes are lettered A through G; the common frame on a keyboard starts with C and ends with B; the staff runs (bottom-up) E through F. shifting between them is jarring.
Is there any logical reason for this or is it just historical accident and tradition?
Only in the treble clef are those the notes that correspond to those lines and spaces. Admittedly, the treble clef (or G clef) is the most commonly used clef. But the lower staff in piano music is on the bass clef (or F clef) which runs (top to bottom) G through A. There is a C clef, which changes depending on the instrument that’s being written for.
In addition, the staff doesn’t run from E through F. If you used a grand clef (the typical piano arrangement, with a treble staff and bass staff joined), then middle C is the ledger line directly between the two staves. They could just have a huge 11-line staff but that would be even harder to read than what they do now.
Historical accident. Numerous clefs have seen use, with C clefs being the most common for centuries, and the standardisation onto the familiar usage only happening in the past 200-250 years. Bach didn’t always write his violin music with a present-day treble clef, for example.
Thinking of a piano stave, with both bass and treble clefs, might help clear things up a bit in your mind. Middle C is on a ledger line at the bottom of the treble clef, or similarly on one line at the top of the bass clef. So when you have the pair of staves, it does indeed have a central position. See here - both notes are middle C.
It certainly can be confusing at first – I remember struggling while I got over the same hurdles.
It might help you to consider that modern musical notation was not designed as a system. It evolved over time, starting with rudimentary pitch notation, gradually adding elements of rhythm and meter, and then slowly gaining complexity and sophistication along with the music it was meant to represent over a period of hundreds of years.
So…looking for a unifying logic between disparate elements (like the “keystone” notes on a piano keyboard and the placement of those notes on a staff) can be a hindrance. The treble clef, for instance, is called that because it was optimized for representing the singing range of the treble voice in choral music. It has nothing to do with the piano.
My advice would be to embrace the chaos and learn the basic elements, like the placement of notes on staves, the layout of the piano keyboard, etc., by rote instead of trying to find a unifying logic behind them.
Once you have those basic elements mastered, you’ll have a much easier time building your skills.
Contemporary musical notation is the result of centuries of attempting to fit each staff to its most common use. What we have today is a closer approximation than what they had 400 years ago, yet there certainly are things that seem to fly in the face of reason. E.g., why isn’t “middle C” called “middle A”? And why isn’t that the note that we tune to, rather than what we now call A-440? My only suggestion is to familiarize yourself with a piano keyboard, and look at middle C. It’s one additional line lower than the treble clef and one additional line higher than the bass clef. Think of it as the link between the two clefs, and just get used to the idiosyncrasies involved.
If you want to learn to read & play music, just get used to it. Many things are difficult at first but become incredibly easy after familiarity sets in.
Other notation schemes have been proposed, but didn’t catch on and aren’t likely to, so entrenched is the current system. Only minor modifications have been made in the last 100 years. The current 5-line, two major clefs (treble & bass) and a few minor ones (tenor, alto, percussion) cover what’s playable and what we can hear. There’s a lot to be said for the status quo in music.
If you think treble and bass clefs are confusing, just try adjusting to a moveable-C staff where C is defined as the line or space the notator puts the clef on. I kid you not, this was a common system a few centuries ago.
I’ve wondered how that came about. Perhaps it has something to do with the A-minor scale.
Because that C is in the middle between the top and bottom of a great staff (the typical piano layout with treble and bass clefs). Strictly speaking, Middle C exists in two places: one ledger line below the top staff or one ledger line above the bottom. If the parts of the great staff were placed exactly one line and two spaces apart, ascending or descending music would move in exact, even steps between them. However, they are now used spread apart a bit, and that mathematical placement relationship is lost.
Suitability for purpose. Movable C clefs are just as easy to get the hang of, in context, and in some ways are better suited to that music than modern systems. But of course, a Beethoven sonata with these clefs would be horrendous!
Regarding the etymology of ‘middle C’: I strongly suspect it’s related to the physical layout of the piano keyboard. Can’t find anything obvious on Wikipedia or by Googling, but I’ll try one or two music forums and see if anything is suggested.
It certainly corresponds to that, but is that definitely the origin? (Yes, I’m nitpicking, but it is GQ after all 
)
I wouldn’t swear to it, and it could be a music urban legend, but quite a few sites I found mentioned that.
And I don’t think Middle C is EXACTLY in the center of every keyboard. Wait – I’ll measure some…Nope, on 2 keyboards, it is to one side.
I did find one that said that the original staff was 11 lines, but that was too big to be usable and was split into the great staff. I suspect that info is bogus, although I saw an 11-line staff someone invented once that did away with sharps and flats by using extra lines!
It’s going to be to one side of any 88-key keyboard. There is no “center” number of an even-numbered array.
That assumes the elements are arranged in an evenly spaced linear fashion. Remember that on a piano keyboard, the space for the white keys overlaps the black keys:
http://homepages.ius.edu/yhacker/piano_keyboard.jpg
You could take a 1 octave section out of that starting on a white key (without repeating the starting white note), and you would have a 12 key keyboard which had 7 white keys, one of which would be dead center.
However, most keyboards, especially on acousic pianos, are not centered on the frame. Where do you measure the keyboard, from the outside of the frame or the first & last key? Not that it matters, because I think we’re barking up the wrong scale here.
The source I mentioned earlier, found here,says:
While I think that is correct, it goes on to say
…which contradicts what I learned in music history class, that staffs grew from a few lines to the present 5, to wit:
But that doesn’t answer the question of why that key wasn’t called “A.” Does anyone know what the central key would be in the precursors of the pianoforte?
Oh yes, the 11-line myth, I’ve battled that one many times. Utter nonsense. If it begins ‘in early times’, this is normally the case. In the early 15th century, some scribes expanded to 6 lines, but the pitch errors by the interval of a third are vastly greater than with five. The visual distribution across five lines, with one providing a clear centre point, is very important.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that four or five ledger lines are fine for violinists (and I presume players of other instruments in this range) to read a melodic line with ease, but head up to top Ds and Es, and 8va works better. Flautists probably claim they have no problem :dubious:
The naming of notes far predates pianos, going back to medieval liturgical chant. I suppose there is a reason for C ending up as the central point of a piano staff, which is precisely because neither of the clefs are C clefs. Movable C clefs allowed the pitch we know as middle C to be placed on any of the five lines of the stave, depending on the range of the music you were writing, to use as few ledger lines as possible. If you wanted it to be below or above, for a high or low voice, another clef was necessary, hence G (treble) and F (bass) clefs. Which also were originally movable, although now have a set position. The standardisation onto set clefs, much later on, used these two, and as a consequence the midpoint is (middle) C.
Edit: and this standardisation wasn’t necessarily taking place in order to accomodate keyboard instruments. Earlier instruments wouldn’t automatically have any one note at the centre - it just wasn’t important. If playing baroque continuo parts, they’ve only got the bass clef with figures to indicate harmony, anyway.
I don’t know why A should be A, instead of C, but I’ll take a wild guess:
In Western music several centuries back, folks tended to think in terms of modes. A particular mode consisted of all the white notes (i.e., no sharps or flats) starting on a certain letter. Alas, I can never remember which name (Aeolian, Dorian, Phyrgian, Mixolydian, etc.) goes with which scale. (Doubtless five minutes after I post this someone will post a link to a Wiki article on Church Modes; having spent the day hauling sheetrock I’m too durned tired to bother; so sue me). The mode that corresponds to our natural minor scale ran A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A; the mode corresponding to our major scale C-D-E-D-G-A-B-C; my favorite old mode, with a raised (sharpened) fourth ran F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F. Most of these old modes have fallen out of use.
So anyway, my guess is whoever assigned letters to notes was fondest of the natural minor (Aeolian?) mode running A to A; so that is why A, not C, is A.
This has nothing to do with the question that I meant to convey: why are the notes named such that the major scale with no sharps or flats runs from C to C, rather than A to A?
