The pentatonic scale is worldwide, but the six and seven-note, etc. scales vary tremendously.
Raymond Horton
Gerald Berg wrote:
Well I believe by now Chomsky is seen as being wrong -- to learn language requires a teacher or at least something to mimic early in life otherwise it won't happen at all. But I'm no expert merely a mimic on the subject.
Our tempered tonality is fake -- it is entirely abstract - it has no basis in external reality. Birds don't make music -- they use sound for function. Bird song is not produced for joy but for vigilance.
What I find extraordinary is that tonality can be seen as plain or routine. That particular sound patterns elicit emotion is entirely cultural. But this is what makes it so wonderful and useful.
As a composer I can predict a listener's (albeit a perfect listener) state along a continuum. This folds a tremendous amount of expressive power into tonality. Without these cultural reference points there is no way to predict the state of your listener and no way to bring them back once flown except by reverting to a 'cultural reference' of some sort. There isn't a vigilant quota to music. It is not a prerequisite.
I am reminded of the other topic that makes it's yearly round (maybe this was in O-list most recently) of high art over the entertainment arts. While often bemoaning the lack of artist merit in most pop confections one rarely hears about the lack of entertainment in art (except by virtue of an absence of audience which paradoxically engenders the topic in the first place). What's with this? Po-mo Puritanism?
Flying solo here -- our brain is earth's most perfect mimicry machine. If we see it we will mimic it -- from flying birds to mini-suns. Eventually, we will find our way to a relationship with it. Our humanity comes from recognizing that there is no moral force to our mimicry and that's why we are fearful.
Jerry
On 5-Feb-05, at 7:54 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
That's a straw man, Owain. Of course English isn't "natural" (read: innate), but the common fundamental grammar (Chomsky's "universal grammar") that makes human language possible in the first place is clearly innate, and, like the man says, universal.
No one is arguing that the Western system of functional harmony is "natural" or innate. Only that there might well be some innateness to more general concepts of "consonance" and "dissonance."
- Darcy -----
David W. Fenton wrote:
And when you eliminate the concept of dissonance in the musical text (i.e., the dissonances are never resolved), then you no longer have a distinction between the two types of intervals beyond the culturally defined meanings the listeners bring to the table.
On 05 Feb 2005, at 7:20 PM, Owain Sutton wrote:
This is a good explanation of the situation - unfortunately it's beyond the distance that even musicians are prepared to go to question whether their understanding of music is inate or acquired. I do find is scary, that people can react so vociferously against any suggestion that the major/minor tonality that *feels* natural to them is actually not something inherent or natural. They wouldn't react the same way if I told them that English wasn't the 'natural' language, or that base-10 wasn't 'natural' maths (assuming we got that far in the maths class :p ) But I find the defensiveness that surrounds western tonality quite scary, and very puzzling.
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