I thought this might help those of you who wonder why we do things certain ways in music theory get an understanding for their historical significance.
A Brief History of Music Theory
Around 1600, a group of people who called themselves the Camarata (sort of like Rogers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Lowe and Kander and Ebb with Andrew Lloyd Webber as chairman) had found a group of out of work Divas and decided to create a new type of music for them. They decided to call it Opera, which remained quite popular until someone changed it to Oprah and went off in a completely different direction.
The Camarata also decided that if they were going to create a new type of music that they needed a new system of music writing in which to write it. After much brainstorming, they decided to develop the Major/Minor System of Tonality. Knowing full well that the Church in Rome would probably not like it, they decided “what the heck” and incorporated the tritone (the diabolus in musica or the devil in music), which the church had been trying to suppress for centuries, as a main feature of this new system. Thus was created a new kind of music, a new system of music, and our modern day Devils in Music or Divas.
Though the new idea caught on, there was no standard for this new system of Tonality. The Germans were doing their thing, sternly, the Italians were going along happy go lucky, and the French – well what more need I say. Also, a set of arbitrary rules was needed so that teachers could have fun chastising their pupils, and the new Tonal Police (with Major Linguini, Capt. Puccini, and Minor Smith) needed authority. So in 1620 they decided to hold a convention in Zurich (neutral as always) and met at the Zurich Intercontinental. This was at the same time the Pilgrims were fleeing Europe as much as a reaction to opera, divas, and the whole Major Minor System thing, with its indiscriminate (and unholy) use of the tritone, as for religious freedom.
Though the conventioneers agreed upon the idea that scales should have seven tones and were in full accord with the Major Scale, they hit a snag on the Minor Scale (the Italians preferring the Natural Minor since they thought that it made such beautiful melodies, the Germans the Harmonic Minor since it made such forceful harmonies, and the French the Melodic minor which, since it was different ascending than descending, made so much confusion. They also had a problem with note names. On the one side, the French, Italians, and Spanish wanted the system of Do, re, mi to name the notes (of course the French chose “Ut” instead of “Do” since “Ut” has that inimitable French sound of shaping your mouth like an “oo” but saying “ee”.) [*Note: the Italians got the last laugh here. They knew that there system would be immortalized by Rogers and Hammerstein in The Sound of Music.] On the other side were the Germans and the English who preferred the alphabet. But even they were not in full agreement. The Germans wanted to have an “H” in their system knowing full well that in about 40 or 50 years they would need some way to spell B-A-C-H in music. This required B to mean Bb and H to mean B natural and that just didn’t seem proper to the British. So in general, they agreed to disagree and each country got their own naming convention. Of course, Larousse got the rights to publish the note name translation dictionary for English – German – French – Italian/Spanish.
Of bigger concern were the black keys on the piano (though the piano had not yet been invented, they had enough foresight to work out the key names for it). Should we call them flats or should we call them sharps? It was sort of decided that when going up to call them sharps and when going down to call them flats except in February which alone has 28….Oops,wrong exception to the rule. That rule would work most of the time except when it wouldn’t. Then the Irish (they hadn’t really been invited to this convention because they were always playing pranks) managed to ask about the places where there were no black keys between the white keys – E-F and B-C. So just to shut them up and send them back home, the convention agreed that we could have E#, Fb, B#, and Cb knowing full well that those would not be necessary for another 150 years. Of course, the Russians after a night of Vodka and Caviar asked about what would happen if you sharp an F# or flat a Bb. Knowing that they may nuke the world over less important things, the convention admitted double sharps and double flats. Then again, the conventioneers knew that double sharps and flats would not be needed until Wagner and Liszt – both of whom tried to make up for centuries of lack of usage in just about everything they wrote. Heck, Wagner needed 20 hours of Ring Cycle jsut to make a dent in the unused double sharps and flats, as well as the white key sharps and flats. He was only upset that the scale didn’t have more notes in an octave and he would have used every one of those too.
Next came how to order the chords in a piece. Of course musicians are notoriously bad at math and so we got the system (using the archaic Roman Numerals) that 7 is followed by 3 is followed by 6 is followed by 2 is followed by 5 is followed by 1. Thus, to this day musicians cannot count beyond 7 and they do it this way “1-7-3-6-2-5-1.” You tray adding 2 + 2 in that system and see what you get.
Through the course of the convention, they made numerous other decisions. By the way, the conventioneers had at the beginning elected Rameau as secretary, but since he was not yet born, they chose someone off the streets as secretary pro tempore who knew nothing about note taking, let alone music notes, to be of much good, thus leaving Rameau to work out many things on his own. Because of this we originally got all of these clefs that kept moving around – “G clefs”, “F clefs”, and “C clefs” (which was the most moveable). The funny thing is, the “C clef” wasn’t even intended by the musicians. It happened when an Italian was pointing to the G clef or the F clef (I don’t remember which) and said to the secretary, “See, that’s a clef”. All the secretary heard was “C clef” and centuries of music students were befuddled. It wasn’t until the 1800s that most had been replaced by G clefs and F clefs, though tenors, cellists, violists, and trombonists like to keep them around for old time’s sake.
After many other decisions, the convention was adjourned and everyone went home to see how quickly they could each violate every rule that they had just devised (they were artists and therefore not bound by rules). Of course the French didn’t even wait to get home. They just started violating rules the minute they hit the streets.
[*Note: Andrew Lloyd Webber got the French (and everybody else) and they didn’t even see it coming. He sewed up the rights for “Phantom of the Opera” right then and there to turn this classic of French Horror into a very profitable British Musical. He also booked every major theater around the world so that he could fill them with his musicals and thus leave no room for anyone else to stage a production. But that’s another story.]
