Hunglish.orgMusical notation from German-influenced countries -- including Hungary -- contains the weird key of "H". Where does it come from? Here's your answer, presented to you quicker than you can say "The Bach Code."
Written by Scott Savoie
As an amateur musician, I’m always looking for people to play music with.
One of the things that I learned upon arriving to Hungary was the fact that their musical notation differs a bit from what I was used to.
For example they have a note „H”.
This struck me as odd. H, of course, would logically come after, say, G.
Instead, this H is placed between A and C. The order is then AHC instead of ABC which makes more sense to me.
I decided to google this little oddity and it turns out that this system is traced back to Johann Sebastian Bach.
Bach liked to call B „H” and he liked to call B flat „B”. In this way he was able to „write” his name in the music. This is called the „Bach motif,” as he was apparently quite thrilled by this cryptogram.
So that is it. Bach liked to use the arbitrary letter names of musical note to spell out his name and thus an illogical naming system is created and must now be dealt with by music learners in German-influenced musical areas.
If Stravinsky did something like this, would we have songs in the key of Y? Or would the key of Y be because of the Village People?