Author: brycon
Date: 2017-06-20 07:06
Quote:
I hadn't thought about working from the middle of the grand staff in both directions and this conjecture makes sense. But when the grand staff came into common use (promoted by Guido d'Arezzo), it would still, for want of a more historically precise term, have been "middle ut." The numbered octaves fuzzy asks about had to have come into use much later because they would have had to start numbering from the bottom of the piano keyboard. No one in the 11th century would have thought to call the middle of the grand staff, once it had come into use, "ut4."
Well, I guess the implicit argument I was hoping to make was that our classification and notation systems are rather messy--concepts don't always progress through history in a logical manner. I assumed the numbering system C1, C2, etc. comes from the keyboard--likely a simplification of Helmholtz's system, which, if I remember correctly, is based on the middle C of the keyboard/grand staff.
Quote:
But that's a huge leap forward in time. Was the importance in modal harmony of the white key mode that starts on la - what we would call Aeolian mode or natural minor - great enough to have led to establishing a separate la-based system that became the modern letter-based A through G staff (but with C4 still in the middle of the grand staff)?
I'm not sure about the use of alphabet letters for pitches in the English-speaking world. I browsed Groves; it mentioned that the practice is rather old (predating the keyboard and grand staff) but not much else.
At any rate, it's important to keep in mind that solemnization, in addition to predating the keyboard, greatly predates tonal harmony. We live in a Cmajor-centric world and take it for granted. Bernstein, for instance, attempts to account for minor sounding "sad" by referencing the minor third's place in the overtone series. Minor, for him, must be an alteration to the more natural and fundamental major scale--just as Riemann more comically accounts for minor as the "undertone" series, the mirror image of the major overtone series.
But in terms of the era of vocal polyphony, there's no reason to assume that our middle C (262hz) and its corresponding scale enjoyed such a privileged status at that time: vocalist sang where things were comfortable, pitches weren't fixed frequencies (which became a huge problem in the era of travelling instrumentalists), the major/minor scale didn't yet exist, etc.
So with regard to why middle Do is C and not A, I'm not sure there's a single answer. There's a tension of pre-tonal traditions holding over into the tonal era, vocal practices melding with keyboard practices, and so forth. Again, it's messy.
Post Edited (2017-06-20 08:33)
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