[lbo-talk] For LBO's music theory crowd

[Mike Beggs]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Doug Henwood<dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
> This is what the paper says: "All musical traditions employ a relatively
> small set of tonal intervals for composition and performance, each interval
> being defined by its relationship to the lowest tone of the set. Such sets
> are called musical scales. Despite some interesting variations such as the
> pélog scale used by Gamelan orchestras in Indonesia whose metallophone
> instruments generate nonharmonicovertones, the scales predominantly used in
> all cultures over the centuries have used some (or occasionally all) of the
> 12 tonal intervals that in Western musical terminology are referred to as
> the chromatic scale (Nettl, 1956
> ; Carterette and Kendall, 1999
> )."
>
> Is this what you're saying is empirically wrong? Have Nettle and/or
> Carterette and Kendall, about whom I know nothing, been proved fakers?

You can read chunks of the Carterette and Kendall chapter at Google
Books. It's long, a literature review, comes at the questions from a
number of angles, and looks really interesting, but I don't actually
think they're saying that the chromatic scale contains the universe of
world music. The octave looks more universal than how it gets chopped
up into intervals.

We should remember that Western classical music didn't treat the
twelve tones as equal until Schoenberg, and then it sounded pretty
jarring. Some intervals and some scales were more equal than others.
E.g., the tritone was the 'devil's interval' and sounded dissonant to
Western ears, but it came to be used for tension-and-release purposes.
>From the late 19th century at least, 'progress' in music came to be
associated with breaking down the barriers between the keys, splicing
them together. This was a big part of Richard Strauss's shtick,
famously in Salome. And the road to twelve even tones runs through a
growing self-consciousness about the rules of the invervals and scales
(which goes a long way back), and Debussy's encounter with the alien
gamelan music at the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris was a crucial
stop on the road. His comment about the essence of music being the
space between the notes is sometimes interpreted as being a
proto-Cageian appreciation of silence, but I think he actually meant
intervals.

Cheers,
Mike
scandalum.wordpress.com