Naming the White Keys on the Piano - a Historical Note

I teach the letternames of the piano keys in groups of A to G. It is more logical than the usual method of starting from middle C and tagging on A and B at the end.

When I explain the piano keys in this way, kids usually exclaim "Hey, that makes much more sense!"

It is also more accurate historically. The story of how note pitches were first defined is fascinating, and deserves to be more widely known.

The 7 letters A to G were first used for the notes of the scale in an anonymous medieval document entitled Enchiridion Musices. It was formerly attributed to the monk Odo of Cluny, and specified how to mark the notes of the scale along a single stretched string or monochord. It enabled the singers to write down for the first time the letternames for the notes of each chant, and to reproduce their exact pitches on the monochord.

This document dates from 935ad, a century or so before Guido of Arezzo invented the staff (or stave) on which the modern notes are written. The pitches of ABCDEFG as defined here hold good today, since we can assume that the monochord was tuned to the lowest comfortable note of a man's vocal range.

This lowest note was not marked, because it was just the whole (open) string. It was known as gamma, the greek letter for G.

The next note of the scale or "1st step" (A) was marked at one ninth of the string length, defining a Pythagorean wholetone above gamma. B was marked at a ninth of the remaining (shorter) length. Then for C, the reader was instructed to mark a quarter of the whole length, defining the perfect 4th from gamma. These intervals were repeated for D, E and F; and G was marked at the string's midpoint.

The first octave of notes used capital letters (A to G), the second octave used small letters (a to g), and the third octave used double letters (aa to gg). So the notes were originally thought of in groups of A to G. Some later documents used triple letters for the next octave and called these the "treble" notes.

But it all began in the BASS!