"C" is not a note name.

The note “C” in 1986 when we first met.

I’m almost certain the alphabet starts on “A.” So why does the musical alphabet always seem to start on “C?” For years, I’d been telling myself that “C” got popular as major key tonality got popular, roughly around the time of Monteverdi. Because when you play the white notes of the piano starting on “C,” you get the major scale.

But then, the “Do Re Mi” system of naming notes was around for many hundreds of years before that—since the early middle ages—and its first syllable, “Do,” also starts on “C.” What gives? You’d think this would be a simple question, and one that no musician could stand to take for granted. But after looking everywhere, I still couldn’t find a satisfying answer. So I decided I had to go to the source.

“C” isn’t known for granting interviews. In fact, many musicians work with it their whole lives and never address it directly. But after weeks of back-and-forth and a couple cancelled meetings, I was finally able to sit down with the legendary letter itself. From the moment it walked in—no entourage, just that distinctively curved swagger—it became clear why “C” has come to play such a major role in music. The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

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DF: I think the first time we met was way back when I was five, in my first piano lesson. It’s strange we haven’t really talked till now.

C: Man. You know, I think it’s the hardest part about celebrity, it’s the one thing nobody can prepare you for. It’s like, people have this idea of you, but they’re looking right through the real you.

DF: So take me back a little. What was it like before you were so much at the center of things? You must have some crazy stories.

C: Well, I came up in the Roman Empire—I’m a Latinate letter. But I didn’t really get into music until the early middle ages. It was kind of a second or third career for me.

DF: No kidding. What got you interested in music?

C: Honestly? It was the parties. You just can’t imagine the party scene in the middle ages. Plus I’d been in language for a long time and I was feeling like I needed to shake things up a little.

DF: You had a brief stint as a number for a while, too, right?

C: Yeah, I got the gig as the Roman numeral for 100. I still get calls for that every once in a while. It was cool. I think working as a number helped me spot my first opportunity to get into music.

DF: Really? Being a number prepared you to be a note name?

C: Well I wouldn’t put it quite that way. I mean, first of all, it’s not right to say I ever “was” a number, or I “am” a note name. You can’t really name a note. The best you can do is describe something about it. I know that much from having worked as a number.

“C” on the job as a Roman numeral.

DF: I’m not quite following you there. You’re saying you’re not a note name?

C: I’m saying there’s all kinds of ways to name a note. It’s a “quarter” note. It’s the “second” note. It’s a “loud” note. It’s a “guitar” note. So when you say, “It’s the note ‘C,’” that can be a little misleading.

DF: Come on, being “Middle ‘C’” carries a lot more weight than being just another “loud” note. How did that kind of success happen for you?

C: Well, I’ve been really lucky in my career, mostly just being in the right place at the right time.

DF: What was your big break?

C: I’d been doing a lot of work in the monasteries, and they had this problem with the singers, you know how singers are. They’d just go off on their own thing and nobody could get the chants right, so some of the monks were looking for ways to fix the problem. Of course I’d been around long enough to see how the Greeks had used letters for their music notation, but we never did anything like that in Rome. And then sometime around the 9th century—early middle ages—the whole Latin speaking world started to get interested in all kinds of Ancient Greek knowledge.

DF: I always thought the Greeks used these really long, crazy names like “Proslambanómenos” and “Lichanos hypatōn” and stuff like that for their notes.

C: (laughs) Man, my first album was almost called Proslambanómenos. But yeah, you’re right. Actually you don’t need any names at all to play music. The really old timers just built their instruments and tuned them by ear and went for it. But then as soon as you want to try and talk with your band about what you’re doing, well, then you need some kind of names. So the Greeks started naming notes based on the strings of the lyre. The “topmost” note, the “forefinger” note, and so on.

DF: So it was kind of a tablature.

C: Pretty much. But then they wanted to talk about more notes than they could fit on a single lyre. So they started making up even crazier descriptions like “the topmost note of the lower group” or “the middle note of the highest group.” It was a total mess. “Lichanos hypatōn” meant “the forefinger note in the lower group,” which was actually the highest sounding group, because “lowest” meant “closest to you on the lyre.”

DF: So they started using letters?

C: Well, Greek letters, and only to write music down. That didn’t help. They used different letters for notes you’re supposed to sing, versus notes you’re supposed to play on an instrument. Plus they still used the long, crazy names to talk to each other about it. We never got into any of that stuff in Rome, we just stuck to playing our instruments and let good enough be good enough.

DF: I don’t think “let good enough be good enough” is quite how I would characterize the Roman Empire. But anyway, I was asking about your first big break.

C: Yeah, so I’d been working in the monasteries. But a little before that, Boethius had rounded up the whole Greek musical system and translated it to Latin. All of us Latin letters got a lot of work out of Boethius. And the Greek system had grown to fifteen different notes by then. So the first fifteen of us, “A” through “O” got this extra gig naming the notes. I can’t say that was my idea, but everybody was pretty relieved to finally have note names that made some kind of sense.

DF: Hold on, you’re saying there were notes called “J” and “M” and stuff?

C: Yeah. We think of “C” and then “‘C’ an octave higher,” but the Greeks thought of those as two completely different notes. Some of the monks were trying to make it simpler, to teach the other monks. And so this one monk, Odo [of Cluny]—pretty good guy—decided to repeat the letters at the octave, so just “A” through “G,” and then “A” again.

Illuminated manuscript depicting “C” with Odo of Cluny. Early 10th century.

DF: So that was a pretty important moment for you.

C: Well, at first I just felt bad for “J,” but then I started getting double the royalty checks. And really it was a totally different gig. It wasn’t “the third of fifteen letters” anymore. It was like, “the third position in this repeating system.” I mean, it seems simple what Odo did, but it was a big deal. He basically took the monochord, which had been a kind of lofty tool for building the musical system, and repurposed it as an instrument to teach people how to sing.

DF: Actually, I remember reading that Odo divided up the monochord differently, too. That rather than focusing on the perfect ratios like Pythagoras and all those guys did, he focused on the steps between each note instead.

C: Well, yeah, because that’s what was messing the singers up. When you squash all the notes into one octave, and put them in order, turns out the spaces between the notes aren’t all the same. I mean, they’re mostly the same, but two of the spaces are way smaller. You can still see it on the piano, at the spots where there’s no “black” note in between two of the “white” notes. So the whole thing sounds different depending on which note you start on.

DF: This focus on the larger and smaller spaces always bothered me. Because it’s where you get into “whole steps” and “half steps,” and I don’t think people listen to music that way. You just hear one note to the next, and you don’t worry about how much space there is between the notes. That kind of thinking feels so mechanical.

C: You should’ve been a singer.

DF: I mean, I see how it could get messy. Everyone’s singing their chants, but they could all be starting at different positions in the system.

C: Yeah, the guy who really gave me my big break, that was Guido [of Arezzo], he felt the same way you do. Guido knew about Odo, even gave him some shout-outs, but he literally said it was “childish” to teach off of the monochord. Guido was a trip, man, you’d’a liked him. He made up all kinds of crazy stuff and then managed to make it stick.

DF: So it was Guido who gave you your big break?

C: Like I said, part Guido, part dumb luck. But yeah, Guido did two things that really launched my career. First of all, it was his idea to start drawing notes on a staff. He just made that up. So he had these horizontal lines, and he drew them all evenly spaced, because, like you said, that’s pretty much how singers hear things. But then since all the lines looked the same, he had to give you some kind of reference point. Like, “this line is this note.” And guess who he chose for his reference points?

DF: Wow, so you were the first clef.

C: Well, me and “F.”

DF: Why’d he choose you and “F?” You’d think he’d choose “A.”

C: He never said why, but I know why. Me and Guido were close, we hung out a lot. And I told him I was interested in the gig, so at first I thought he was just throwing me some extra work. But later on I realized it was because me and “F” just happened to be right at those two spots that had the smaller spaces between the notes. Right place, right time. You can’t plan this kind of stuff, man.

“C” with Guido of Arezzo, ca. 1030. Photo courtesy of “C.”

DF: So picking you was, like, Guido’s way of sneaking the unevenness back into a bunch of lines that looked even.

C: I’ll try not to take that the wrong way.

DF: But then he still needed the monochord to show what you and “F” sounded like, right?

C: Nope, Guido had this idea that everyone already knew what the notes sounded like—that was the real secret to everything he did. And of course he was always up on the most current chants. So he picked this one really popular chant where each line starts one note higher than the last, and he started naming notes using the first syllable from each line. Like, “Ut” from “Ut queant laxīs,” “Re” from “resonāre fibrīs,” “Mī” from “mīra gestōrum,” and so on. Of course later on people started saying “Do, Re, Mi” instead of “Ut, Re, Mi” because they thought it was easier to sing. But call it what you want, man, that’s where people got the idea that I was the first note. That chant wasn’t even in the “C” mode. It just happened to start on my position.

DF: Wow, so all of a sudden, not only were you a clef, but you were also the first note of the original “Do, a deer…” song. That’s huge.

C: Yeah, except “Do, a deer…” came way later, after my mode had already become the “major” mode. So “Ut Queant Laxīs” used syllables everyone knew to get you to the modes, but “Do, a deer…” kinda flipped it and used a mode everyone knew to teach you the syllables.

DF: That’s crazy. So do you think the success of “Ut Queant Laxīs” and the “Do, Re, Mi” system had a role in helping you become the “major” mode?

C: No, not at all. Don’t get me wrong, it was a huge hit. But with “major,” I was just in the right position again. The world was changing, man. People were starting to care more about “progress” than about, you know, contemplation. I’d seen it happen before in Rome, but not like this. So they got interested in “direction,” and “tension” and those sorts of things. And there was this idea of a “leading tone” where the smaller space between two notes supposedly created a feeling of more tension. And, you know, only “F” and I had that.

DF: Then why didn’t “F” become the “major” mode?

C: Actually it almost happened for “F” in the late 1950s, probably it should have. We both had the leading tone, nobody else had that. We both had fifth notes that were perfect ratios. We even both had that wider third note that everyone was starting to like. But my fourth note was a perfect ratio, and “F” had a fourth note that people had literally been calling “the devil in music” for a long time. It’s tough to shake that kind of stigma, even with a really good PR team.

DF: Man, that sucks for “F.”

C: “F” was alright—it still kept its gig as the “bass” clef. And we all had mixed feelings about “major” getting so big anyway. You know you can’t copyright a chord progression, so definitely nobody was getting paid to be a mode. I got lots of work out of the whole thing, for sure, but then you know how some acts get so big that they just end up doing commercials and things like that? I mean, look at me, I’ve never really had any hard edges. But after “major” happened, I’ve pretty much become the “children’s song” note.

Excerpt from… basically every beginner music book.

DF: That’s rough. But overall, sounds like everybody weathered the rise of “major” pretty well.

C: (sighs) Not the syllables, man. The syllables got hit really hard. Like I said, the moment “Do, a deer…” dropped, they knew it was over.

DF: Wait, you’d think “Do, a deer…” would be great for them. Seriously, everybody knows that song.

C: But you have to understand what their job used to be, it was really cool what they were doing. Me and the letters were always describing positions in this ancient system. But the syllables were a shortcut to hearing those positions. Then once “major” happened, they ended up just describing the same thing me and the letters were already describing.

DF: Damn.

C: Yeah, they tried all kinds of other stuff, like “moveable Do,” and “La-based minor,” but really the numbers “1” through “7” already had all of that covered. So the syllables have been able to hold on to some of the overseas market, and singers still kind of like them, but things were never quite like they used to be. I feel bad for them, really.

DF: Have you ever seen anyone rebuild a career after something like that happens?

C: Well you’ve got to pay attention to what people are doing, look for new opportunities. Like, for a while people have been describing pitch using letters, and that’s not what we do—we describe position. But then right there, there’s a chance for colors to get in on the action. I think colors could describe pitch better than anyone else could. The experience of pitch, anyway. Not, like, frequency.

DF: So what about the syllables? Do you see any new opportunities for them? I mean, if anyone’s been around long enough to spot trends, it’s you.

C: You know, our system grew beyond seven notes a long time ago, kinda like the Greek system outgrew the lyre. I’ve been thinking about that, because those other notes have never really had their own names. The one thing none of us has ever been able to do well—not even colors—is to describe a note entirely on its own, without referencing any kind of position at all. I think syllables would be perfect for that. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should get rid of position, but position is more complicated than it used to be, and notes don’t need to be carrying that kind of responsibility anymore.

DF: But then there would need to be five more syllables.

C: What’s the big deal? There’s lots of syllables out there looking for work. Guido had no trouble finding the original crew.

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