Music Theory for Beginners 3 - The Musical Alphabet

The Musical Alphabet

The name 'Musical Alphabet' refers to the names of the twelve notes that fit inside an octave. Because the Major Scale, the foundation of Western music, contains seven different notes, the first seven letters of the alphabet have been used to name them: A B C D E F G. The remaining five notes fit between these, and instead of being named after letters of the alphabet, they are named according to how the established set of seven must be adjusted to reach them.

Let me demonstrate what this means: If we take the first two notes, A and B, there is an unnamed note in between them. To reach that note, we would have to either move the A up a semitone (sharpen the A), or move the B down a semitone (flatten the B). So this in between note, depending on the context at the time, will either be called an A sharp (written A#), or a B flat (written Bb). Each of these in between note has two names, depending on how you get there (sharpening the note below, or flattening the note above).

The full Musical Alphabet is as follows:

A, A#/Bb, B, C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab, A.

Notice that for certain pairs of notes, B C and E F, there is no in between note.

Wouldn't it be easier just to use the first twelve letters of the alphabet instead?

Yes, until you start thinking of music as based on a scale. Once you understand the relationship a piece of music has to the scale it is based on, it becomes more useful to think of the notes in terms of how they relate to the scale in question, rather than using absolute names. There are some musical traditions which go beyond A to G, but this is exhibited more in the Eastern European traditions. In Western music this is not the case.