That’s what I meant by “something to do with the A-minor scale”.
As a flautist, I would like to pitch in to say that I stand by this claim. 
Getting way beyond my sphere of knowledge, it would appear that the first recording of the use of letters to represent notes is with Boethius in the fifth century. Unfortunately, this also is well beyond the boundary of any meaningfully-reconstructable music.
The note we recognise as A has no particular prominence in the Guidonian Hexachord, which partly describes and also influences a lot of music for centuries. No particular significance is given to ‘A’. But ‘ut’ does correspond to C.
Hah. I will now commence with all other stereotypes regarding flautists 
Oh, sure, drag Guido into this. That’s almost as bad as a flaunting flautist. 
Well, I got ambitious enough to do a little research and will provide a Wiki link myself.
I was right about A to A being the Aeolian Mode (a.k.a. Hypodorian Mode). Alas, it was the second church mode, not the first, so it leaves my theory grovelling in the dirt without support. Maybe it was somebody’s personal whim. . . .
From that link: There is a common misconception that the church modes (also called ecclesiastical modes) of medieval European music were directly descended from the Greek notion of modality mentioned above. In fact, the church modes originated in the 9th century. Authors from that period misinterpreted a text by Boethius, a scholar from the 6th century who had translated the Greek musical theory into Latin..
On the one hand, Boethius was using letters to identify pitches. On the other hand, perhaps you’re right, that we’re better off starting off with church modes, to work out where the modern-day letter names really stem from.
Either way, I bet we’ve lost the interest of those who asked!
I too am intrigued about “Why C and not A”.
Here’s what I (think) I know, correct me if I’m wrong.
The Greeks picked 7 notes for their scales. The frequencies of those notes are simple ratios to a starting point:
C 2/1
B 15/8
A 5/3
G 3/2
F 4/3
E 5/4
D 9/8
C 1/1
I assume the Greeks knew something about the Harmonic Series, or just found that simple ratios produced pleasing harmonies. They used these same seven notes in various scales which we now call “Modes”, e.g. the one from D to D is what we call Dorian, A to A is Aeolian, and C to C is Ionian. See the link provided by BJMoos.
What I can’t find out, is what the Greeks called those notes. But somewhere along the line they got named A through G. Fine, using the Aeolian as boss. But it’s actually an odd decision (or accident maybe) because Aeolian is minor and has more complex ratios:
A 2/1
G 9/5
F 8/5
E 3/2
D 27/20
C 6/5
B 9/8
A 1/1
And on preview I see GorillaMan is right. Maybe it’s time for a new thread.
That actually sounds like it would be a much less confusing way to do it (for me anyway). At least I’d have an anchor for C which I could then map to the keyboard.
I’m not a musician and never will be, I’m just trying to learn enough to fake a melody on a piano well enough to be recognizable. I’ve tried many times before and have never been able to make the association between the lines and spaces of the staff and the keys they correspond to.
Maybe you should forget about trying to read music and concentrate on playing what you hear. Some people are better oriented that way.
Certainly the ability to read music is less important than 100 years ago. Recordings can communicate more than written music can, and if you find it easier to listen than read, go for it.
I wouldn’t recommend that if you wanted to pursue a professional career, but it looks like your goal is just to have fun, so why make it difficult?
Alternate advice-- try a Color Keys system.
Note: I have no experience with this product, do not endorse this product, and don’t even know how expensive it is. But if you buy the product in the link, they send you music with the notes colored various colors, plus some sticker-type labels which you apply to the keys. Then, rather than having to figure out that the first space in the treble clef is F, and then locate the F, you see that the first space in the treble clef is green, and you look for the green note. A simple, child-friendly form of this came with our piano, when we bought it 30 years ago. I then took years of piano lessons, so reading music comes easily to me.
All of this reminds me of a time I was working with a 7th grade clarinet player after school one day. She was learning a major scale and I was helping her. Suddenly, she had a realization. “Hey,” she said. “They’re [the notes are] in alphabetical order!”
Gosh I love teaching middle school. They keep me in stitches.
That’s my problem… they’re not in alphabetical order unless you consider “CDEFGAB” or “EFGABCDEF” to be ordered!
No, they’re still in alphabetical order. They just start in the middle of a sequence.
If your goal is to learn to read, any questions about why the system isn’t different won’t really help you. I learned to read music about the same time I learned to read English and for me, it’s just about as easy and natural. In the end, the system is just a code that is widely used and recognized, and it is what it is.
Just think how much it would slow down your reading if you were preoccupied with wondering why doesn’t x represent the k sound instead of x, and why is the alphabet in that order anyway? They might be interesting questions, but the answers won’t help you read. You might invent or imagine a system that makes more sense to you,but it would not be a system in which the great works of literature were written. They could be recoded into your system, but who would be interested other than you?.
Learning to read music is not much different than learning to decode English writing. At first you need rote repetition until you can recognize and decode without thinking. Then it’s just practice, practice, practice. There is no shortcut.
Isn’t it brilliant when they invent their own mnemonics? I wish I could ever remember them myself, because they’re often hilarious.
I think this is probably a good approach. There’s a handful of points where I do say to children “there’s not many things I’m going to ask you to just learn, but this is one of them…”. Such as why a major scale goes tone-tone-semitone-tone-etc. Or in some cases, I respond to their queries with “I could tell you the answer, but it’s very long and you probably won’t find it interesting”. They always accept that one, for some reason
For some reason, playing handbells seems to bring out a disproportionate number of notation issues. (Well, as opposed to singing in a choir or playing piano to the limits of my ability–never terribly difficult, and now I’m out of practice.)
Part of it, I think, is that in handbell music, one can generally view the whole of the great staff, but then only need to concentrate on a line and a space. Figure out whether your notes are generally sharp, flat or natural, mark any accidentals or key changes, and then the rhythm becomes the biggest issue.
People frequently have rhythm issues where they want more rests in the measure than the publisher puts in them. And sometimes there are issues where a note is marked twice (How do I ring a whole note and an eighth note on the same bell at the same time? You don’t–just ring the whole note. (Although sometimes, you do need to re-ring the bell.))
Still, all you really need to be able to do to play hand bells is tell your right hand from your left, be able to count to 4 (or 6), and know your colors (if the bell choir is one that marks music heavily).
Given that the director of the bell choir I joined recently has gotten the impression that I’m a pretty talented/experienced ringer, I was horribly embarassed when he pointed out that the (E# F) notation in the “what bells does Eureka ring?” portion of the header meant that sometimes a note is labeled E#, and needs to be played by me on the bell labeled “F”, and is totally not the problem of the person sharing music with me, who is responsible for the D and the E.
Yes, I have played songs where it made sense to divide up the C# and the Db between the person playing the C and the person playing the D.
ETA: I have omitted them from this post, but bellringers often include numbers in any discussion of notes. They are counted in octaves starting from that C at the bottom of a grand piano and going up. I think Middle C is C5.
Not unless bell ringers do it differently from everyone else. Middle C is C4.
I’ve never performed in or directed a handbell choir, but it sounds like you are using music that isn’t written for that instrument. If it was, the E#/F and the whole note/eighth problems should be fixed before the choir sees the music. No one asks a trumpet player to transpose from concert on the spot.
Bellringers might do it differently than everyone else, but it’s more likely I miscalculated. (Although I’m not convinced. /Thinks about what bells she’s played lately, and what numbers were on them and where they were on the staffs. Then thinks about where the C7 goes–above the staff–“High C” to a soprano )
Ok, checking Google. . . .
Bellringers do do it differently from everyone else. Middle C is C5 for handbells, but I was wrong when I said it was like the piano.
Music I have played with minor notation issues was arranged for handbells and professionally published as handbell music. The directed then “parted it out” (divided up the bells among the ringers) and may have marked it. (I’ve played with bell choirs in 5 churches in 3 states, not all directors mark music to the same extent. I have had it marked for me with each bell a different color, I have had it not marked at all before I got it. It all depends on the director, the level of difficulty, the standard level of skill of the ringers, etc).
I’m not sure I’d call it common, but it isn’t that unusual in a complicated piece–or a piece with key changes, to have a particular note labeled more than one way. In this most recent case, the song is in the key of A, with three sharps, C,F, and G. Neither my music theory, nor my memory of the music in question, is strong enough to explain why sometimes it makes sense to label a note as E# and sometimes F–although the fact that F with no symbols by it in the measure is actually F# probably has something to do with it.
And the rhythm thing is similar. Most of the time I can look at a whole measure and figure out why it was written the way it was, although I may not be able to explain it. It’s a convention of bell music, not proof that something was originally written for a different instrument.
Well, F natural is not part of the scale of F# major, but E# is; any scale should use each “letter” once and once only (except for the top and bottom notes). Similarly if you want a “grace note” a semitone below G# in a chord of E major, the “grace note” is not G natural but Fx (F double sharp). (At least, when Hector Berlioz wrote The Shepherds’ Farewell he agreed with me.)
It does appear that C5 is used as middle C for bells. I wonder if that is due to the many harmonics in that kind of instrument. If the fundamental and second harmonic are similar in loudness, our ears tend to hear the pitch a little differently than if they are quite unequal, and bells are rich in overtones.
To tackle the E#/F question, the decision to call a note one or the other is mostly from a theoretical point of view. As Malacandra pointed out, some letter names exist in some scales but not in others even if the pitch sounds the same.
To the purist, those two pitches are not the same. Without getting too deep into acoustic theory, before the equally-tempered scale was invented, the pitches of each key were slightly different from every other as to the internal construction. (F in the key of D wasn’t quite the same pitch as F in the key of C). Some smart person noticed that the difference was extremely small, and if each of the differences were adjusted by a unnoticeable (to the average person) amount, we could have one universal chromatic scale instead of 12. (Imagine what would happen if you had to retune the entire piano when you played in another key!) Thus the Well-Tempered Clavier.
So for all practical purposes, E# and F are the same pitch. Get used to it. It could be worse – what if I told you that G double-sharp and B double-flat are the same pitch? 