3 ms·

Although this is cool and educational and I hope it helps people make music, I have to admit I've seen that this scale obsession in students learning Music Theo

Although this is cool and educational and I hope it helps people make music, I have to admit I've seen that this scale obsession in students learning Music Theory may not be the most productive. I've seen people falling into these traps studying scales. First, fundamental building blocks of pitched music is always intervals, never scales. Scales matter in so far as they relate to a tonic through intervals. Scales give us a "summary" or "snapshot" of the intervallic content of the music. Learning about scales is never a substitute for learning about intervals. Only thinking about scales can be a baggage because sometimes you can miss operations that make sense in terms of intervals but go outside the scope of the scale. (This limitation of scales is well known and well studied as starting mid-20th century composers (especially atonalists) and musicologists started thinking in terms of Set Classes instead of scales). The other trouble is, I've seen that people study this kind of material too much in abstract. E.g. one can go and study Messiaen's scales ("modes of limited transposition" as he calls them) as if it's mathematical material. Although this is a-ok, music theory is best used to make or analyze music. It's best to learn these scales then sit down on your piano/notation software and actually make music. Music you like to listen. Not only will this help you understand the scale (i.e. the harmonic content of the scale) better but also motivate you to learn more.

goldfeld 4y ago
Ethiopian culture is as ancient as the bible and rich with ancient wisdom, western music has a limited number of standard modes and oriental music offers a lot of variety there. We go just by greek heritage coupled with african aggregations. You would say a student of raga should be "obsessed" sbout particular ragas to full immerse in them? Also just exploring and hearing non-western music is a marvellous experience if you find the good parts. I'm doing something not so oriental, as I'm learning Chinese rock songs to help language acquisition, and been posting about that[0]. 0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/who-led-me-here--xie-tian-xiao-1-lyrics-meaning https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/who-led-me-here--xie-tian...
- gnulinux 4y ago
  I'm very familiar with non-Western music and I studied music theory in abstract, not tainted with Western bias. There are models of music that are universal and found in all cultures, these directly come from the acoustic/physical properties of music. When I said the most fundamental building block in pitch based music is intervals, I didn't mean to say that for Western music, I really did mean "music". "Music" is a universal concept, found in all cultures, anthropologically we don't know of a culture that doesn't have "music". Although "music" is wildly different in each culture, it can still be studied in a generic way. Not all cultures necessarily have pitch based music, but if we do find pitch in music, intervals are the most fundamental tool to understand it. In Western music intervals are 12TET (an octave divided into 12 equal parts) but this doesn't have to be the case, this is merely an arbitrary convention. However, in other cultures we still do see intervallic treatment. These intervals may not be the same (e.g. Balinese Gamelan uses various tuning system, some similar to 9TET and 5TET (i.e. divide octave into 9 or 5 equal intervals). In short, my comment above applies to Ethiopian music as well, so does it to any music.
- gnulinux 4y ago
  On a second read of your comment, I must say, I slightly misunderstood you and replied with this misunderstanding. I think if the music itself is "obsessed" with a certain structure there is nothing wrong or bad or misguided about being "obsessed" with that structure. In this case, if these modes are truly ubiquitous in Ethiopian music, nothing wrong with teaching, studying or using them. My original post was intended for people who are learning from scratch. I think it's better to understand the intervallic structure of a given music or musical repertory, instead of just the scales. But there is nothing wrong with scales themselves, as they're truly very useful models of music.

goldfeld 4y ago

Ethiopian culture is as ancient as the bible and rich with ancient wisdom, western music has a limited number of standard modes and oriental music offers a lot of variety there. We go just by greek heritage coupled with african aggregations. You would say a student of raga should be "obsessed" sbout particular ragas to full immerse in them? Also just exploring and hearing non-western music is a marvellous experience if you find the good parts. I'm doing something not so oriental, as I'm learning Chinese rock songs to help language acquisition, and been posting about that[0]. 0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/who-led-me-here--xie-tian-xiao-1-lyrics-meaning https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/who-led-me-here--xie-tian...

gnulinux 4y ago
I'm very familiar with non-Western music and I studied music theory in abstract, not tainted with Western bias. There are models of music that are universal and found in all cultures, these directly come from the acoustic/physical properties of music. When I said the most fundamental building block in pitch based music is intervals, I didn't mean to say that for Western music, I really did mean "music". "Music" is a universal concept, found in all cultures, anthropologically we don't know of a culture that doesn't have "music". Although "music" is wildly different in each culture, it can still be studied in a generic way. Not all cultures necessarily have pitch based music, but if we do find pitch in music, intervals are the most fundamental tool to understand it. In Western music intervals are 12TET (an octave divided into 12 equal parts) but this doesn't have to be the case, this is merely an arbitrary convention. However, in other cultures we still do see intervallic treatment. These intervals may not be the same (e.g. Balinese Gamelan uses various tuning system, some similar to 9TET and 5TET (i.e. divide octave into 9 or 5 equal intervals). In short, my comment above applies to Ethiopian music as well, so does it to any music.
gnulinux 4y ago
On a second read of your comment, I must say, I slightly misunderstood you and replied with this misunderstanding. I think if the music itself is "obsessed" with a certain structure there is nothing wrong or bad or misguided about being "obsessed" with that structure. In this case, if these modes are truly ubiquitous in Ethiopian music, nothing wrong with teaching, studying or using them. My original post was intended for people who are learning from scratch. I think it's better to understand the intervallic structure of a given music or musical repertory, instead of just the scales. But there is nothing wrong with scales themselves, as they're truly very useful models of music.