![]() ![]() I would guess that as keyboard music developed as its own genre, it became much more useful to be able to play fast runs in the major scale - lots of early keyboard music is based on existing pieces of vocal music with the addition of fast, "improvisational"-sounding ornaments. ![]() ![]() The first surviving organ with a fully chromatic keyboard, from the late 14th century, still has B flat as a "diatonic"/"white" key. On those keyboards B and B flat were both "white keys", with no "black keys" at all. Wikipedia and Grove Music online (subscribers only, unfortunately) note that the original organ keyboards (13th century) had only the pitches of the C major scale, plus B flat, because that made up more or less the entire pitch resources of the religious music sung at that time (and instruments would have been used only for accompanying sung music - at least in church). (You can't add any more "half-steps" between E and F, or between B and C, without expanding your tuning beyond 12-tone equal temperament). Put these "between" the diatonic keys, in the right order in the chromatic scale, and you have something very close to the standard piano keyboard. ![]() Subtract the diatonic pitches C-.-B from the set of all twelve pitches and you are left with C#/Db, D#/Eb, F#/Gb, G#/Ab and A#/Bb. Then assume that you want to have one particular diatonic scale easy to play, and that you'll put the other pitches on harder-to-reach keys. One answer is that it gives you all the notes of the diatonic scale on the white keys, so by transposing to C major you can play any major-key melody that doesn't modulate using only the white keys.Īnother way of saying this: assume that you are working in our musical system, which has twelve-tone equal temperament as the background "system", but within that the diatonic major scale is the most commonly used set of pitches. Interesting question, although my answer might be more historical than you'd like -) ![]()
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