Also, different keys sound best in different instruments. I suppose someone could build a C-major saxophone, but it probably wouldn’t have as good a natural sound as a B-flat one. Different keys have different sound qualities on a given instrument, and so each one tends to be designed for the key in which it sounds best.
Ahh right, that’s odd. for brass instruments the figuring is open when you’re playing the note of the key.
In fact, someone has built a saxophone in C. Here is an example. There is also a C saxophone pitched an octave lower than the example given. I’ve heard (no cite) that the C Saxophones died out because they produced a mellower, softer sound that couldn’t compete with the Eb and Bb horns when music became stronger and louder. This being anecdotal evidence that, yes, instruments can sound better in certain keys.
Mmmm… not exactly. On brass instruments, there are quite a few different notes you can play with an open fingering. On a saxophone, the “open” note is a C#. This is regardless of whether or not the sax is an Eb or Bb instrument. On an Eb sax, that C# is the same note as a piano E-natural. So C-natural on a Eb sax is the same note as Eb on a piano. C-natural on a Bb instrument is the same not as Bb on a piano. That* is how the key of an instrument is determined.
So why not just call that C on an alto sax Eb? Wouldn’t that make things easier? Yes, in some ways. It would save a lot of transposition. Having played a number of different instruments, I’ve made a simple guess about the reason for this key-shifting: it’s done to keep the instrument’s range (lowest note to highest note) centered on the five-live staff. Most instruments playing is done in the middle part of that instrument’s range. So centering the range on the staff reduces the number of ledger lines required above and below the staff. Once notes get past 3 ledger lines in either direction, they become difficult to follow. So centering the range prevents this.
The highest practical note on a sax is Eb, written 3 ledger lines above the staff. The lowest note is a Bb, written on the space below the first ledger line below the staff. So the centering is rough, but close.
Would somebody please explain “Concert Key” and “Concert Pitch” for me. I had always thought the actual note A on the piano (or from some standard pitch pipe or tuning fork) was what all instruments needed to tune to for the note A. I know it’s that way on a guitar, the only instrument beyond a piano I have any real familiarity with.
If wind instruments play some note other than A to produce the sound of A, why is that?
yes, you’re right, shows that I haven’t played my instrument for quite a few years ago, on a brass instrument you can usually play the note that is the instruments key and that note’s 5th in all the different pitches throughout the instruments range.
'cos they’re playing in a different key.
Two reasons. (1) To keep fingerings consistant throughout the instruments and (2) to center the range of the instrument on the staff.
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Throughout families of instruments (Flutes, Clarinets, Saxophones, etc) the fingerings for their respective notes are kept the same. If you were playing an Alto Saxophone, and saw the note G in the music, it would be fingered with the first three fingers of the left hand. Then you go and play Tenor Saxophone, and you see the same written note, G, on the page. It is fingered the same way. Note that these two Gs produce different concert pitches: Bb and F, respectively. If the instruments were not transposed for, the two Gs would produce the same pitch (Concert G), but would be fingered quite differently. Transposing instruments keeps the player from having to learn a completely different fingerig scheme for every different instrument.
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As Phase42 said, keeping the range of the instrument within the staff greatly simplifies reading music. Notes become difficult to read when too many ledger lines are put on the paper. In fact, music is occasionally written within the staff, with signs (such as 8va or 8vb) used to show what octave the notes sould be played in.
I wish flute music were written an octave lower. After seven years, I’ve gotten used to mostly reading ledger lines, but it looks like whoever decided to keep the range of the music somewhere near the staff forgot about the flute. 
I believe I answered it here.
To recap: The Ionian scale is what sounded “nicest”. It just happened that the piano started with an A key, or rather, the key at the far left was labeled A. So Cs began and ended the Ionian mode scale. Had the two whites and black key not been at the beginning, what is now C would’ve been called A, and A Major would’ve been the name of the scale with no accidentals.
Oops. Nevermind my broken link. Just look for my previous post in this thread.
This is merely speculation based on our modern piano, and it is also incorrect. The tonal key system was in place at least a century before the piano assumed its current pitch range. Before the piano was the harpsichord and before that the clavichord. Back then the lowest and highest notes were not standardized, but differed from instrument to instrument:
here is a clavichord that goes down to F.
From this site:
So you see, the range of the modern piano tells us nothing of keys.
This is also a misconception. The natural A minor scale is not tonal, but modal. The harmonic minor and melodic minor scales are tonal because of the half step between the raised 7th and the root (this is what gives the root note its gravity, its pull). The misconception comes in often when poeple are describing these scales as if they are distinct from each other. This is a way too involved and complex idea for me to try to explain here, but I’ll try to just give a brief overview.
First, composers did not think in terms of writing in harm. or mel. minor. They simply wrote in minor and raised the 6th and 7th degrees accordingly depending on where they wanted the voices to go next. If they wanted, for example, a melody to come to a sense of completion when reaching the A, they would raise the G to a G# right before it to create that feeling of completion that you get with a half step, which you don’t with a whole step.
If the note before the G# was an F, then that is a leap of an augmented 2nd (a very ugly sound). To smooth it over a composer might raise the F to an F#. These pitch raises were not constants that would be applied to an entire piece, but choices made on a note by note basis.
I believe, though I’m not sure, that the terms “harmonic” and “melodic” minor are used primarily as pedogogical tools to help describe and ease understanding of what were not thought of as scales, but as choices to facilitate voice leading.
Very well. I suppose the only point left from my post that has yet to be debunked is:
“So, the answer to “why is C the only major key without black keys” boils down to: it’s a matter of convention developed over centuries by Music Theory. It just is, is a simpler way to put it.”
Any arguments here?
I don’t believe this is the reason. There are various clefs that could solve that problem a heck of a lot easier. Besides the more common G and F clefs, there is also the C clef which is movable on the staff. Conventionally it appears either on the center line (called the alto clef) or the line above it (tenor clef) and always defines the “C”. cite
To be honest, I have long wondered the exact reason for transposing instruments.
Well, I guess I can’t argue with that (or at least I can’t come up with anything better). 
As I’ve explained, this is just not true. Early recorded vocal music dates back at least 500 years before the first keyboard instrument was developed (probably much more, but I’m going on memory here).
I really don’t know the reason that the particular letters were chosen the way they were. It could’ve been completely arbitrary, but actually, the more I think about it the more likely it seems that, at the time, there was some reasoning behind it.
Maybe it was based on the very first chant every written. It was likely tied in with religion somehow (since every thing was during those times), though I don’t even have a guess as to how. But it certainly had nothing to do with the way the notes fell on the piano.
Good info you’ve posted here, Moe. Do you mind if I offer a few WAG’s?
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The A is commonly used to tune (string) instruments in an orchestra. Maybe at some time someone picked a note as the base for the scale, which was used as well for tuning.
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For some reason or another then the base scale was started like a minor scale, instead of a major scale. It looks like this is what the OP wondered about. As I understand it, the A-B-C-etc. scale corresponds to the Aeolian mode, but I’m not sure whether that is deliberate. I get the impression that most Gregorian modes are (in modern parlance) like a minor key, see for example the Dorian mode. The ‘dominance’ of major keys may well be a modern development. So maybe around the time the letter-to-note thing got fixed (1500-1600?) it was more natural to put it in minor?
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A counter-argument seems to be the earlier use of ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la for scales, which goes back to Guido of Arezzo ca 1000. I see this mostly ‘translated’ as C-D-E-F-G-A. That would point to a major scale. But I wonder whether Guido wasn’t simply meaning to denote the relative notes of the melody, while the actual tone would depend on the mode in which the melody was set, similar to a numbered system of chords.
A propos, I found a lemma in the 1911 Encyclopedia on musical notation.
Googling around for Guido seems to disprove my guess. (I’m assuming the reliability of the sites I found)
He invented the four-staff notation system, that was the precursor of our current five-staff system. In that, ‘ut’ (now ‘do’) definitely corresponds to the modern ‘C’. See the music of the original hymn. So it looks like the basis for our notation system was a major scale starting at ‘ut’, nowadays ‘C’.
Hence the mystery remains: why does ‘ut’ not correspond to ‘A’?
See here about the change from ut to do and the addition of ‘sol’. More about Guido.
(sorry about the first link, I can’t get that correct, possibly because of the single quote in the URL)
In addition to the saxophone, I also played the bassoon, and I remember the tenor clef. Pain in the neck! Most bassoon music is written using the bass clef. But a bassoon has a greater range from low to high than most instruments, so writing in the upper range of the bassoon in bass clef woule mean writing 5 or 6 ledger lines above the bass clef staff. Not only difficult to read, but it would also tend to overlap into the staff line above it.
Personally, I hated the tenor clef. Switching clefs in the middle of a piece, especially when I didn’t see the tenor clef that often, was a pain. I much preferred to see the part written an octave lower and marked with an 8va--------
Don’t violas read the alto clef?
FWIW, my “contributions” to this thread should have been prefaced with some disclaimer such as “I don’t know this for sure, don’t have any cites, and it’s based on what I have put together from various readings on Music Theory, and from observation.” I have been curious about the topics covered here, and do feel I have expanded my understanding some based on the other posters’s comments.
So little of this is presented concisely in any of the basic books I have had access to, and my interests have been primarily in the areas that influence Jazz Theory. In fact, the most comprehensive treatment on that subject I have found yet is The Jazz Theory Book By Mark Levine which manages to skip past some of the why aspects of these issues.
Another source that provides a great deal of insight into these and other issues is A Jazz Improvisation Primer by Marc Sabatella.
If any of you have some references for the historical aspects of transposing instruments, the origin of the Major and Minor scales, etc., please provide some links. I’m definitely wanting to improve my knowledge in these areas.
I apologize for not providing the proper disclaimer to my comments before.