Music Trivia: Do you know why music starts with C?

June 20, 2023

Do you know why music starts with C?

The names of seven basic pitch levels in music are called pitch names: C, D, E, F, G, A, B. In countries that use Latin alphabet as their phonetic script, first letter of alphabet is "A", but when alphabet is used to represent pitch sequence, it begins with "C". Why is it so?

It turns out that, like pictograms, appearance of pinyin letters is also associated with pictograms. It is said that letter "A" was written backwards after pictogram of head of a bull. At that time, cows played a very important role in people's lives, so letter "A" was first letter. In early Middle Ages, when Greeks used letters to indicate pitch, letter "A" was used first, while first sound of modal syllable was "A". Later, in process of evolution, height of sound name was fixed, and various modes appeared one after another, gradually forming a system of music theory in which major and minor modal syllables predominated. These two scales have a certain relationship to medieval music: minor scale starts with "a" but uses only lowercase letters to distinguish it from major scale. The major scale has physical and practical causes (for example, in C major scale, all keys on keyboard are white), and C sound is first note of scale. Modern music theory is based on C major, so sequence of phonetic names has become a natural habit, with "C" becoming primary and "C" taking first place in phonetic names.