Shelagh Fogarty 1pm - 4pm
Who Decided How Music Notes Sound?
Who came up with the musical notation system?
Mystery Hour Question
Who came up with the musical notation system?
Mark, Walthamstow
Answer
Qualification: Musician and Conductor at Royal Academy of Music
Answer: J. S Bach standardised all notation and published a series of volumes called ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier”, i.e “The Evenly-Tuned Keyboard”.
If you go to an orchestral concert, every note has a different resonance and you’ll find the orchestra tunes up to what we call an ‘A’. This note in the middle of the stave and resonates at 440 beats per second – the standard by which all other notes are related by tone or semitone.
Before Bach did this, it would’ve been ‘hit and miss’, or composers would’ve written in ‘perfect pitch’.