The Major Scale - A Complete Perspective
Part – 3 : Seven letters, five symbols – A Fairy Tale
Part – 3 : Seven letters, five symbols – A Fairy Tale
Disclaimer: This article is not completely based on historic facts, but uses allegory, strictly for educational purposes and to make a point.
Once upon a time, long ago but perhaps not so very far away from where I'm living in Europe right now, there were a bunch of guys who were singing all the time, always using the same type of melodies. On of these dudes had a clever idea and suggested that the notes could be identified by using the letters of the alphabet. And since the notes they were using were seven in total, the letters they used ranged from A to G:
A – B – C – D – E – F – G
And after reaching G, it was the same note again as 'A', only higher in pitch!
Everybody was happy and the system worked for a long time. Everybody was happily chanting using the notes of this scale. Until... several hundreds of years later, someone discovered that the distances between each of the notes was not always equal! The distance between the notes A and B, was of a different type than the distance between the notes B and C! They found out that all along they had been cheating music out of a couple of notes, which they were skipping. So after much research and deliberation, they had their notes A – G and five unidentified notes. What should they do?! Everybody was already happily using this system of letters A – G and it worked. It was too late to change that system and start using the letters A – L.
Then, one of the guys in authority (back then, everybody who was anybody, was a high-ranking church official, and they decided on all matters, including music), who were discussing this issue, had a clever idea:
These five foreign tones, would be seen as the 'neighbouring' tones of the familiar ones. It would be, for example, like looking into a circular street with houses, where you would see the houses of good friends and their neighbours: First there's Adam's house, then Adam's neighbour's house. Then we have Brian's house and then Connor's house. Then Connor's neighbour's house, followed by Dwayne's house. And so on.
These five foreign tones, would be seen as the 'neighbouring' tones of the familiar ones. It would be, for example, like looking into a circular street with houses, where you would see the houses of good friends and their neighbours: First there's Adam's house, then Adam's neighbour's house. Then we have Brian's house and then Connor's house. Then Connor's neighbour's house, followed by Dwayne's house. And so on.
This was of course a silly and inefficient naming principle but back then they were just ignorant about this fact, perhaps even wilfully so. People have always been traditionalists by nature, clinging to the old familiar ways. And why not, if it works? Well, personally I feel that logic should rule over tradition, whenever it leads to better science.
Now let's get back to the naming of the musical notes. Because people in the music business have clung to the old system of alphabetically naming the notes A – G, we have 5 notes with variations on these letters, identified by a special token next to the letter. And to make matters worse, they thought it would be useful to make a distinction between ascending and descending sequences. When ascending, the neighbouring notes would be considered “sharp” and when descending the neighbouring notes would be considered “flat”.
The corresponding symbols chosen to identify these distinctions, are recognised today as:
The corresponding symbols chosen to identify these distinctions, are recognised today as:
SHARP | FLAT |
 |  |
Notice that the symbol for flat, looks like the uncapitalised letter “b”, so this letter will be used for the flat symbol throughout the remainder of this article.
With this system, it was finally possible to summarize the ascension of the 12 notes like this:
A – A# – B – C – C# – D – D# – E – F – F# – G – G#
And when descending the sequence, they would do it like this:
A – Ab – G – Gb – F – E – Eb – D – Db – C – B – Bb
In a sense, the only reason that this system exists today, is that once upon a time, people discriminated the black keys of the piano and regarded them inferior to the white keys.
The only logical naming convention with no distinction between ascension and descension, would be:
A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L
Because I have been programming software for a while and created the guitar software program “FretBoardKnowledge”, I thought about this for a long time and almost decided to switch to the logical system of using letters A – L. I finally decided not to, because it would take more time than I was willing to spend just to get used to this new system, as I was already thoroughly accustomed to the conventional system. Instead, I decided upon a “flats only” convention, generally preferring the “flats” over the “sharps”, because in jazz music and related styles, flats are more common.
So eventually, when we put the twelve notes in sequence and using “only flats”, we get a circle like this:
Since this treatise is part of a series on the Major Scale, let's take a moment to consider again that the notes that were originally grouped by using the letters A – G, are now still being used more than any other grouping of notes. Starting on the letter C, this grouping is identified as the Major Scale. So for further theoretical exploration and in favour of simplicity, we will use the C Major Scale as our subject. The C major scale is made up of the following 7-note sequence:
C – D – E – F – G – A – B
Read some factual information on the history of note names here:
Alexander Stakenburg
