Music theory for nerds
&gt; It completely obscures the relationship between the pitches, though.<p>It doesn&#x27;t actually obscure the relationship between the notes -- it makes them clearer.  For example, I see the notes C, E, and G on some sheet music, maybe with some accidentals on some of those notes.  I know that I&#x27;m therefore supposed to play a C triad.  Now, there are multiple kinds of triads, but once I know I&#x27;m supposed to play a triad, it&#x27;s easy to use context to pick out which one I need (major, minor, diminished, augmented -- usually one of the first two).  If I were supposed to play a C# major triad, though, and the written notes were (C#-F-G#) as opposed to what they should be (C#-E#-G#) then that&#x27;s confusing because it looks like I should be playing an arpeggiated sus4 of some kind.  So the written nature of scales on the staff engenders an understanding of the relationship between the notes.  Basically we write things the way we do so that the people reading the music can more efficiently pattern-match.<p>&gt; C major is identical to A minor, and I don’t understand why we need both.<p>They&#x27;re not identical.  C major and A minor have the same <i>notes</i> in their respective scales.  But we say that a piece is in the <i>key</i> of C major when it resolves to the a C major chord at the end, and we say a piece is in the key of A minor when it resolves to an A minor chord at the end -- an important concept for reasoning about how a piece is supposed to be performed.<p>&gt; C minor:    C       D   D#      F       G   G#      A#      C<p>Eb, Ab, and Bb, not D#, G#, and A#.<p>&gt; This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever.<p>It&#x27;s really not.  Keep practicing.  It makes sense, I promise.<p>I hear a lot of people -- usually people who have not been studying music for very long -- insist that the system would be more logical if there were no accidentals and there were 12 notes with distinct names and the staff had a bunch more lines on it.  I&#x27;ve never bought it.  The notation of music isn&#x27;t arbitrary, it&#x27;s informed by experience and it <i>works</i>.