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.
Me: The Western musical scale, be it tempered, pathagorian, mean or whatever, closely follows a VERY natural phenomena, and similarities in musical scales can be found in all major musical cultures. The octave and the overtone series IS what music and sound is all about. The interval of an octave contains an AC-like "duty cycle" that begins with a pitch and ends with the other pitch an octave higher. The tri-tone separates the + part of the cycle from the -. As a second interval moves away from a unision the tension between the second interval the the orignal fixed interval decreases and a harmonic concordance is found around the third or sixth. Schoenberg's idea was simply a product of his own personal agenda; his own studies in harmonic theory should have shown him that. I think it is time we start to realize that there is something besides culture and tradition involved in musical harmony/concordance. It's called science. If people are defensive, what is so scary about that? If that is scarry, then perhaps it could be considered equally scary that people have swallowed Shoenberg's theory of the equality of intervals. Don Robertson www.dovesong.com
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