Something that has intrigued me for some while is the fact that in German notation, there is a note 'H' , located between B and C (H being our B natural, B being our Bb).

My question is : how did this come about? It doesn't seem at all logical to have an 'H' between a 'B' and a 'C'...

Any ideas anyone?...

H is B in German and B flat is B. This means you can spell BACH in musical notes!

In german they have onamatapeic note names Aflat, A and A sharp are "as", "A" and "ais" respectively. Most other nores are the same, but I think the pronounciation doesn't work with B, so they have an irregularity for that note.

There is no B sharp at all.

http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory2.htm#origin

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There is no B sharp at all.
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B# is "His"!

That was a very interesting read - thanks C!

Besides the B A C H notation (ie Bflat A C B natural) , D. Shostakovich used D S C H , the S being Es or E flat, so his signature, which he used in several places in his symphonies and Quartets, is D E flat C B natural.
In Ravel MInuet on the name Haydn he manages to spell Haydn !. He just contunes up the piano ABCDEFG, thaen the next octave is HIJKAL etc, so eventually there is a note for each letter of the alphabet.

HAYDN becomes B A D D G.

I knew it was to do with the 'hard hexachord' and 'soft hexachord' and the way that the bs were written for each - and the natural sign being connected with an 'H' but I couldn't remember exactly so I knew good old Brian Blood would have it!

I thought for a second there that you were talking about decimalised music:

Doh, rei, me, far, so, lah, woh, boh, tee, doh






That was years ago that was proposed.

One of my students always struggled to pitch a low C on his cornet so he re-named them h instead and could play them perfectly!