Just a joke. The Greek alphabet is different from the Latin alphabet which is used in the rest of EU. This is why the euro coin looks different.
In music, the notes between A and C have different letters in different countries. English uses the series “A, Bb, B, C” while German uses “A, B, H, C”.
It’s often said that the H is a type-o of a different shaped B symbol, but that’s not really the truth nor the cause of the problem.
The issue is that the Greeks found the B/Bb note before notation was invented. They knew that the overtone series would result in his note and used it when describing their system.
Much later when staff notation was invented and refined by munks in Italy/Germany, they still hadn’t figured out the full chromatic series of notes, so it was kind of a problem that there were 2 different notes where B was supposed to be. Briefly explained, they simply called one of them H.
Some centuries later and with the invention of the equal temperament tuning it became clear that there is nothing special about the B note. Similar intervals exist between all other notes and they are better described as sharp and flat variations.
To keep things interesting they chose to make the signs for sharps and flats look like H and b.
Wow! I’m a musician and didn’t know this. I always wondered why it’s CDEFGAHC. I also always wondered thy the fuck it’s not just ABCDEFGH. Probably precisely because of what you were talking about.
Hm? Explain yourself immediately!
Just a joke. The Greek alphabet is different from the Latin alphabet which is used in the rest of EU. This is why the euro coin looks different.
In music, the notes between A and C have different letters in different countries. English uses the series “A, Bb, B, C” while German uses “A, B, H, C”.
It’s often said that the H is a type-o of a different shaped B symbol, but that’s not really the truth nor the cause of the problem.
The issue is that the Greeks found the B/Bb note before notation was invented. They knew that the overtone series would result in his note and used it when describing their system.
Much later when staff notation was invented and refined by munks in Italy/Germany, they still hadn’t figured out the full chromatic series of notes, so it was kind of a problem that there were 2 different notes where B was supposed to be. Briefly explained, they simply called one of them H.
Some centuries later and with the invention of the equal temperament tuning it became clear that there is nothing special about the B note. Similar intervals exist between all other notes and they are better described as sharp and flat variations.
To keep things interesting they chose to make the signs for sharps and flats look like H and b.
Wow! I’m a musician and didn’t know this. I always wondered why it’s CDEFGAHC. I also always wondered thy the fuck it’s not just ABCDEFGH. Probably precisely because of what you were talking about.
Cool, thanks!