What are the origins of music symbols?

Question

Are the first 7 letters of the english aplphabet used all over the world to identify notes?

Answer 1

Frist note that the idea of SEVEN distinct notes is related to the WESTERN system of music in which the OCTAVE is central (more on that below).

As far as the symbols and letters we now use --

The system of using LETTERS to mark the notes goes back to at least to Greece and Rome. Roman writer and statesman Boethius assigned 15 letters to 2 octaves' worth of tones about AD 500 .
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mmusicnotes.html

This led to the system of "neumes", apparently based on letters of the Greek alphabet, used to record Gregorian chant. These began to be written above and below a line to indicate intervals -- the foundation for the next step in notation, the STAFF, perfected by medieval music theorist Guido of Arezzo. In fact, Guido also invented what became the clef signs as well as the "do re me" system, though it was originally "ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la", after the initial syllables of lines in a Latin hymn for the feast day of John the Baptist. (The number of lines in the staff varied, in part according to whether one was writing out vocal or instrumental music. The modern system of a standard 5-line staff was first adopted in France, and became widely used by the 16th century.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_of_Arezzo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation#Development_of_music_notation

Of course, once you had a fully developed staff system, you did not necessarily need the old stylized letter-forms to distinguish the notes --their position on the staff was enough. Yet something akin to the old system might be seen in 18th-19th century America "shape-note" system used by "singing schools", in which different notes of the scale were indicated on the staff by a few simple shapes (usually four) to aid people in learning to read/sing vocal music (immediately knowing the intervals by the note shapes). It used a simplified syllable-system with just fa, so, la and mi (hence is often called "fasola") developed in Elizabethan England. You might still run across hymnbooks printed in the Southern United States that use these shapes.
http://fasola.org/introduction/note_shapes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape-note

Note that the use of SEVEN names for the 'notes of the scale' depends on the WESTERN scale-system, in which there is an "octave" (eight notes) from one not 'back to the same note'. (The rest of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are then indicated by taking each of these seven tones up [sharp] or down [flat] one 'half-step' [or 'semi-tone']). So the system of A - G is a feature of Western music. It is not quite "universal", except insofar as Western music and its notation system is now used all over the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_scale

Actually, far as which NAMES are to be used for the notes of the scale, the system is NOT even uniform in Europe! The Latin countries use the system of solmization (the "solfege" system), using the syllables (ut-re-mi/do-re-mi) mentioned above. The Germanic countries use the letters of the alphabet. But note that even here, Germans also use "H" (based on including what we call "B" and B-flat").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notes#History_of_note_names
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solfege

Answer 2

I was told that the treble clef (also known as the G-clef) came from using the letter G to represent the G above the middle C. I guess over the years it changed in shape to what it is now. Similarly, the bass clef (or F-clef) came from the use of F to represent the F note below the middle C.
I'm not quite sure where we get the symbols for sharps, flats, naturals, rest, etc.
Also, I'm not 100% positive, but I do think that A,B,C,D,E,F,G are universal. Of course in other languages they would be pronounced and perhaps written differently.

Answer 3

Europe!