I was taught music back­wards. Like many that toil in the liv­ing room after home­work at an upright piano I ran my fin­gers up and down the scale and arpeg­gios that were pho­to­copied from a book and sent home with me. Tuck in your thumb when you’re not using it. Try with both hands now. While a nec­es­sary fin­ger exer­cise and aid to muscle-memory these scales were also the foun­da­tion of all the music I would be plink­ing through in my jour­ney to becom­ing a semi-skilled pianist.

I had no real desire to play the piano at that age. I started piano lessons quite young after a mer­ci­fully brief stint with the vio­lin; a mercy more likely bestowed on my par­ents than on me. For me gui­tar was where it was at. I dreamed of a shiny red axe. I would rock out all amped up just like that hair bands of the day. It wasn’t until three years after the con­cep­tion of this desire that my mother trot­ted me down to the base­ment music school of the local instru­ment shop. I was pre­sented with a gui­tar that she bought (a nylon-string clas­si­cal) and sent in for my first les­son. Like all first music lessons the half-hour was spent show­ing me where a few of the notes were on the neck, and a dis­cus­sion of what I wanted to learn. Visions of rock star­dom still danced in my 12 year old mind and I answered that I want to play Rock and Roll sir. “Well then,” replied the teacher, “we must first teach you the Blues.” This is when I learned of pen­ta­tonic scales.

Scales are one of those things we can’t run away from when learn­ing to play an instru­ment. They are the basis for the flavour of a song. They tell you what notes are allowed and what notes are not. Remark­ably no one ever men­tioned to me where they come from, how they are formed, and are there alter­na­tives? We have thou­sands of years of musi­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion and growth that has been doc­u­mented. In learn­ing to play I was deposited on a sin­gle outer branch of a com­plex tree and have been crawl­ing my way back to the trunk ever since in order to explore and under­stand other types of musi­cal traditions.

Much of the pop­u­lar music that one hears today is known as “tonal music”. Tonal­ity is built upon the major and minor dia­tonic scales, and includes tri­adic har­mony. The songs that cur­rently dom­i­nate the aural land­scape are writ­ten from this one sys­tem of musi­cal pro­duc­tion. If you want to play an instru­ment to repro­duce what songs you hear on the radio, then tonal music is the place to start. This makes it the nat­ural thing to teach lit­tle green musi­cians who are eager to hear a recog­nis­able song emanate from their cho­sen instru­ment. Con­se­quently when bud­ding song­writ­ers take up the craft, they tend to go on writ­ing music in this vein. Only those who are pedan­tic, exper­i­men­tal, or untrained in musi­cal the­ory may go on to dis­cover the many other branches of musi­cal systems.

Although so much music is writ­ten using these scales the major and minor scales are just one facet of the dia­tonic scale, which itself is a sub­set of the chro­matic scale, which itself is only one of many other scales devel­oped in the world. If you really want to play some­thing imme­di­ately upon pick­ing up and instru­ment then 12-tone music is the way to go, you will be guar­an­teed not to play a wrong note. To bad it’s not radio-friendly.

In try­ing to expand the vari­ety of musi­cal expe­ri­ence I won­der what the next big thing could be. Would the dis­cov­ery of Church Modes by a tal­ented and saleable new artist give rise to a new style of music that uses these un-tempered ratios? Gre­go­rian chant­ing had a brief hey­day some years back and has now incor­po­rated itself into sev­eral gen­res, the folk music resur­gence of the mid-twentieth cen­tury brought modal music back into the pop­u­lar arena, progressive-rock bor­rowed struc­ture from the com­mon prac­tice period to shake up the repet­i­tive verse-chorus lay­out which so dom­i­nates song struc­ture today, all of which shows that there is a place in mod­ern music for older ideas and sys­tems. In addi­tion it shows that new forms can emerge through blend­ing of musi­cal sys­tems. What would hap­pen if we matched the Prometheus scale with the guide­lines of coun­ter­point and the tem­pos of Speed­core? It bog­gles the mind.

Fur­ther­more, with com­put­ers aug­ment­ing, and in some cases replac­ing, phys­i­cal instru­ments the restraint of play­ing the pre­scribed fre­quen­cies of the sys­tem which that instru­ment is geared towards van­ishes. The piano is unfet­tered from its tun­ing, allow­ing us to eas­ily exper­i­ment with alter­na­tives to what we are accus­tomed. Scales with com­pletely hith­erto unused inter­val pat­terns can emerge because the cost of exper­i­men­ta­tion (build­ing and tun­ing an instru­ment) is eliminated.

I’d like to see the ques­tion of what music is, what con­sti­tutes a song, taught along­side the mechan­ics of whichever cur­rent musi­cal sys­tem hap­pens to be dom­i­nate. I don’t think that run-of-the-mill music teach­ers ever really tackle that ques­tion with their stu­dents, but rather teach them to play in the con­straints of a sys­tem which defines the style of music favoured by the stu­dent, or the teacher, or the par­ent that pays for the lessons as the case may be. While one may teach within a frame­work, it is impor­tant to teach how that frame­work was derived and that there are alter­na­tives that one might like to explore.

When I teach my chil­dren music, in addi­tion to tonal­ity, I want to give them a solid ground­ing in the foun­da­tions of music. If we strip a song of all the tech­niques and flour­ishes that add com­plex­ity, lay­ers, and beauty to the craft of song-writing, we get music in its sim­plest form. We all start out that way; a child ham­mer­ing out ‘Twinkle,Twinkle Lit­tle Star’ one labo­ri­ous note at a time on the piano, the screech of ‘Polly-Wolly Doo­dle’ on the recorder, the hes­i­tant plunk-plunk of ‘Red River Val­ley’ on the gui­tar. At the heart of it all is one fre­quency held for a time, fol­lowed by another one held for a time, fol­lowed by another and so on until the song is fin­ished. Some­times there’s a pause between the fre­quen­cies, some­times there is not. I realise this all sounds very reduc­tion­ist; I fail to men­tion that what fre­quen­cies are allow­able is a very impor­tant com­po­nent that sep­a­rates a song from noise. Of the infi­nite set of fre­quen­cies that you could choose from, only a tiny frac­tion are heard by humans. A smaller frac­tion still may be pro­duced by your instru­ment. Of the range that is pro­ducible only a frac­tion of these fre­quen­cies will be dis­tin­guish­able from each other. Fur­ther still only cer­tain ratios of one fre­quency to another will sound pleas­ant to us.

This amaz­ing amount of unus­able fre­quen­cies for a piece of music is what all musi­cal sys­tems intend to pro­scribe. Not only do these sys­tems lay out rules of per­mis­si­ble notes but they include guide­lines as to their use. For instance: Schoenberg’s 12-tone method sug­gests that each note in the chro­matic scale is rep­re­sented an equal amount of times in a piece. In math terms the dis­tri­b­u­tion curve of notes in the piece is flat.

A scale is just an arbi­trary way to divide the con­tin­u­ous gra­di­ent of fre­quen­cies between the tonic and the octave. The ratios that are cho­sen for the notes of a scale lend that scale a cer­tain flavour. This flavour can be fur­ther restricted or mod­i­fied by choos­ing arbi­trary start­ing points in the scale for a tonic cen­tre (modes) or intro­duc­ing acci­den­tals or aug­ments, or alter­ing the pat­tern of inter­vals that make up a scale.

Beyond restrict­ing our choice of notes we may devise many other sorts of rules and guide­lines regard­ing har­mony, meter, rhythm, move­ment, etc. These rules are a way of direct­ing how the selected fre­quen­cies are to be com­bined to make music. For exam­ple tri­adic har­mony is the norm in the tonal sys­tem, but another sys­tem may favour quar­tal har­mony while keep­ing the same scales. The pos­si­bil­i­ties quickly become end­less con­sid­er­ing the com­bi­na­to­r­ial nature of ele­ments that make up a system.

This post is not meant to bemoan the pri­macy of teach­ing or pro­duc­ing tonal music. It is impor­tant that a musi­cian learn it, for it is the sys­tem of music pro­duc­tion that cur­rently rules the roost, but will this always be so? Pub­lic tastes change, fash­ions change, tonal music may be some­thing old fuddy-duddies lis­ten to while the youth favour some­thing we older folk would find quite bewil­der­ing. Con­sid­er­ing the amount of peo­ple tak­ing up an instru­ment today is by sheer num­bers much greater than those in the past who had the abil­ity to play, and given that we have the means to inex­pen­sively record the music pro­duced and broad­cast it to nearly any­one, nearly any­where, why should we not cover the gamut of musi­cal expe­ri­ence? As lis­ten­ers, we have a greater choice in musi­cal styles to con­sume than ever before, and as musi­cians we have greater abil­ity to pro­duce novel forms than ever before. Teach­ers owe it to their stu­dents to at least men­tion from the onset of instruc­tion that what the stu­dent is learn­ing is just one of many ways to pro­duce music and encour­age them to explore others.

Tags: Esoteric Music, Modes, Music Traditions, Popular Music, Scales, Tuning

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.