Letter notation

In the notation

Letter notation records pitch simply with the letters A through G instead of noteheads on a staff. It can represent rhythm, duration, and polyphonic relationships only in limited ways, if at all, which restricted its use to single-line melodies or supplementary purposes.

Musical use

Before the development of staff and neumatic notation in the Middle Ages, letter notation, which traces back to ancient Greek and later systems such as that of Boethius, was used to record pitches. With the rise of neumes and later five-line staff notation, it lost its practical significance as an independent notation system.

It survives today, however, in naming: the letters A through G still denote the notes of the scale in the international system, and chord symbols in popular music and jazz build directly on it. It should be distinguished from numeral notation, such as the tonic sol-fa method, which denotes scale degrees rather than absolute pitches.