page_title: Circle of fifths
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Circle of fifths / History
caption_attribution_description: Johann David Heinichen's musical circle (German: musicalischer circul) from Neu erfundene und gründliche Anweisung (1711), p. 261.
context_page_description: In music theory, the circle of fifths is the relationship among the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, their corresponding key signatures, and the associated major and minor keys. More specifically, it is a geometrical representation of relationships among the 12 pitch classes of the chromatic scale in pitch class space.
context_section_description: There are sources that imply that Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher from the sixth century B.C. invented the circle of fifths, but they do not provide proof of this claim.  Pythagoras was primarily concerned with the theoretical science of harmonics and is credited with having devised a system of tuning based upon the interval of a fifth, but did not tune more than eight notes, and left no written records of his work.
  In the late 1670s a treatise called Grammatika was written by the Ukrainian composer and theorist Nikolay Diletsky. Diletsky’s Grammatika is a treatise on composition, "the first of its kind, aimed at teaching a Russian audience how to write Western-style polyphonic compositions." It taught how to write kontserty, polyphonic a cappella works normally based on liturgical texts and created by putting together musical sections that have contrasting rhythm, meters, melodic material and vocal groupings. Diletsky intended his treatise to be a guide to composition but pertaining to the rules of music theory.
  Within the Grammatika treatise is where the first circle of fifths appeared and was used for students as a composer's tool.
caption: Heinichen's musical circle (German: Musicalischer Circul)(1711)
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