Beyond major & minor! Fascinating information on unusual scales

Fascinating information on unusual scales

Those of you who are aware of my work, would know about my fascination with the keyboard patterns of scales. In my book ‘Pictorial Patterns for Keyboard Scales and Chords’ I present new ways of approaching the learning of the Major and Minor scales through graphics of their patterns.

In this article I would like to touch on the keyboard patterns of some types of scales, other than major and minor, that have been used through the centuries to sing and play music. These are;

1) the Pentatonic Scale and

2) the Ecclesiastical or Church modes.

The origins of the music of many cultures including Western music come from the natural properties of sound, that is: the natural harmonics that occur in instruments of all types – blown instruments, stringed instruments and instruments that are struck. In the 6th century BC, the great Greek mathematician Pythagoras in his experiments with sound and number, found that by dividing a string in half, the sound moves up exactly an octave. The same goes for when the length of a pipe, such as an organ pipe, pipe is shorted by half. If a string is stopped at the two-thirds point, the sound goes up an octave and a fifth. If we only built our music on octaves, there would be not many notes to work from, as they all are higher versions of the same note. But when we move up by fifths we can create several different notes which can be gathered together as a scale.

PENTATONIC SCALE (meaning five-note scale) The Pentatonic Scale is derived from the naturally occurring interval of a Perfect fifth. A basic form of the Pentatonic scale is created when five notes, each a fifth from the other are gathered together to make a scale. For instance C- G -D – A and E, can be rearranged as CDEGA. When transposed onto F sharp, the scale comprises all the black keys of the keyboard (F#G#A#C#D#). This easy pentatonic scale is a wonderful keyboard scale with which to begin improvising. You will be able to explore the sounds with confidence as all the notes blend well with each other and there are no ‘wrong’ notes.

As this particular Pentatonic scale is derived from naturally occurring intervals it is commonly found in the music of many cultures. For example: Scottish folk songs, (Auld Lang Syne), Negro Spirituals (Swing Low Sweet Chariot), and Chinese and Japanese folk tunes.

As the scale contains no extreme dissonances, it is therefore frequently used in music of an ambient nature for healing and meditation. The late 19th century French composer Claude Debussy, who heard the music of the lndonesian Gamelan orchestra at the Paris Exposition Universelle in France in 1889 began to use the Pentatonic scale and the chords of the added 6th and 9th which derived from the scale, to achieve the sounds of the eastern music he was hearing. This added to the distinctive quality of his music which conveyed the feeling of Impressionism that the painters of the time (Monet and Manet) were able to achieve with their unique treatment of light and colour.

The first five fifths as used in the Pentatonic scale, are taken from the fundamental or starting note, in the Pythagorean tuning system, are well in tune in relationship to each other and to the starting note. Once the series goes beyond that, there will be slight inharmonicities with the tuning. If you move up in perfect 5ths from F that is: F-C-G-D-A-E-B-, you have all the white notes on the piano, enough to make C major scale!

A system called ‘Just Intonation’ or ‘Real Tuning’, based on the harmonic series, was used in European music before the 1600’s. This suited music which mainly stayed in one mode or scale for the whole tune. In Western Music the discrepancies of tuning which occurred when composers endeavored to modulate or change key within one piece of music, were overcome with the advent of Tempered Tuning which was first devised in 1596 by the mathematician Simon Stevin who was the first European to construct a monochord using the mathematics of the twelfth root of 2.

Tempered Tuning became established in the 1700’s when, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote two sets of 24 Preludes and Fugues called ‘The Well-Tempered Klavier’ to demonstrate the possibilities of this revolutionary approach to tuning, writing pieces which explored every Major and Minor key. The first book was completed in 1722 and the second set was completed in 1744.

As mentioned previously prior to the 1700s European music was based’ first on Pythagorean tuning and then on several other tuning systems, including just intonation, before the tempered system became widespread. (For more information on the changes in tuning SYSTEMS between 1482 and 1596 refer to Math and Music – Harmonious Connections , by Trudi Hammel Garland and Charity Vaughan Kahn- ISBN 0 -86651-829-0)

In the early days of the Gregorian chant, most music was sung as a single note, but when notes began to be added as harmony notes, they were mainly the pure fourths and fifths derived from the Pythagorean tuning. The religious music and the secular improvised music played outside the church, was handed down in the aural tradition for several centuries until the development of notation. The monk Guido D’Arrezo, who lived around 1000AD devised the system of sight-singing using a hexachord or six note scale, and Sol-fa syllables that we now sing as ‘Do-Re-Mi’. Guido’s syllables were taken from the first couple of letters some of the words of the hymn ‘Ut Queant Laxis”. So his original system was actually UT ‘re’ ‘mi’ ! It was at that time also that the beginnings of staff notation and clefs came about, so that the intervals could be pitched exactly. A red fine was used for F, a yellow Line for C, a black line for the A in between and any others. For several centuries a four line staff sufficed. The five line staff became more usual from the 1400s on.

MODES.

The Gregorian chant was sung in several scales known as Modes. I have given a history of the development of modes in Book 3 of my Contemporary Piano Method, but to cut a long story short, by the 1500s a standard system of seven church modes was recognised. As the name “mode” suggests, these are scales played in a different fashion. Their names are: Ionian (same as the major scale), Dorian, Phyrgian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian.

From the practical standpoint of the keyboard player, the advantage of thinking of the major and minor scales as patterns on the keyboard, is that to play a mode, you simply run the scale over a different range. For instance if you play C Major scale (all white notes) from the second note to the ninth note, (that is from D to D along the white notes), you will be playing the Dorian Mode on D.

Therefore if you know the keyboard pattern for a scale, such as B Flat Major (which has 2 flats – B flat and E flat), you simply play the keyboard pattern from C to C to find the Dorian mode. This is a great help when improvising or composing. Modes are favourite scales for Jazz musicians, who blend the modes with their matching chords.

Many composers over the past centuries used the modes, beginning with the church composers in the 11th and 12 centuries including the Abbess Hildegard Von Bingen, who this year celebrates her 902nd anniversary! You can find modes in the baroque music of Bach and even in the classical music of Mozart!. By becoming aware of this fact you can avoid mistaking the scale for the usual major or minor scales.

Contemporary classical and jazz composers from the time of Debussy (1862 -1918) on, in their quest to depart from the Major/minor tonality and chromatic harmonies of the majority of 19th century romantic music, began to explore the possibilities of modal sounds.

I recommend that students be aware of the various scales, modes and chords in each piece, and, through their knowledge of keyboard harmony, be able to predict the following chords in a progression

You can find more information on the modes and how to find them in Book 2 of my Contemporary Theory Workbook series and in Book One of the Contemporary Chord Workbook. For the sounds of the Modes refer to Contemporary Aural Course Set 7 (Hear Your Chords!) and Set 8 (Hear More Chords!) To help you find the keyboard patterns for the scales refer once again to ‘Pictorial Patterns for Keyboard Scales and Chords’

Dr Margaret Brandman