[sdiy] B and H (was: PolyKorg Clone frontpanel)

[ASSI]

On Sunday 11 May 2003 11:19, jhaible wrote:
> Magnus is right. B is right (as in A, B, C ...).

Using A, B, C, D, E, F, G for the steps of the septatonic scale is 
really a transliteration from greek, so why not use Beta to 
disambiguate? Using latin letters for notes started to happen somewhere 
during the 10th century in europe, however I could not find a reference 
when the B was changed to H and whether it really was an copist error. 
The use of clefs to mark the position of the "root" steps on the staff 
goes back to Guido v. Arezzo (a Benediktin monk, not a trappist) at the 
end of the 10th century. he is also credited as having invented the use 
of the spaces between the staff lines.

> H is the fault of some monk who mistook a B for an H
> when he copied sheet music centuries ago,
> and this error was propagated in Germany (Europe?)
> ever since. Or so I've been told.

I rather suspsect it has to do with the fact that both C-Major and 
A-Minor were absent from the church scales until about the 16th 
century. All church original scales did neither have flats nor sharps 
in their signature and since church music was also notated by just 
concatenating the letters (the rhythm was implied anyway) instead of 
writing the notes on staffs, it may be that the B was deemed to 
ambigous with the flat sign. But as I said, I can't find any reference 
on that little charade.

> But I've learned it as H, and every time I see a B
> my brain interprets it as B_flat. (This is is the
> *real* bad thing, that they assigned the letter B
> to something different afterwards. Anybody
> knows why on earth they did *that* ?!)

No, but since otherwise we wouldn't be able to play B-A-C-H, I suggest 
we keep it that way. ;-) I'd rather want to know which puritan soul has 
put the B back to where the H is.


Achim.
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