A Little Flat: The Music Our Ears Overlook

[ardcarp]

Once again Radio 4 trumps Radio 3 in discussing a musical topic in some detail. This programme: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001bkyc yesterday at 11,30 discussed the 'scales' or we might say 'modes' of non-western music traditions. including India, Chima and other places on the globe.

The presenter mentioned how some of these traditional scales are become somewhat 'Westernised', in other words, tending to copy our diatonic scale (e.g. the white notes from C - C on the piano keyboard.)

Musician, DJ and producer Nabihah Iqbal celebrates the variety of music systems across the globe.

Drawing on musical traditions from around the world, she takes a closer look at the notes and scales used to make music. She examines how and why our ears hear some music as ‘in tune’ and other music as ‘out of tune.’

With the help of a range of musicians and music experts, Nabihah asks if we are missing out on certain musical experiences and looks at what the future holds for music across the world.

Professor Roger T Dean at the MARCS Institute, explains that the notes we use to make music are much more flexible than the keys seen on the piano might suggest and how our ears are conditioned to like certain sounds.

Nabihah hears from music scholar Dr Joe Peters and examines the issue of a shrinking music biodiversity. Nabihah explores what this means for music on a local and global scale with the help of vocalist and educator Anuja and musician and electric sitarist BISHI who demonstrates the freedom possible from playing music across different traditions.

Multi-instrumentalist and researcher, Dr Khyam Allami, discusses how technology impacts what type of music we make and are exposed to and suggests solutions for a rich musical future.

I found this very interesting...and surely it cries out to a Radio 3 audience? Closer to home, both Scottish and Welsh melodies are often based on a different scale. Even some older English folk melodies use a scale which avoids the usual leading-note/tonic interval.

(Possibly the programme brought Equal Temperament confusingly into the argument. Western 'classical' music from say 1550 onwards still uses the diatonic scale as we know it without bothering too much about Equal Temperament, the latter being a compromise solution to the fine tuning of keyboard instruments.)

[smittims]

Thanks,ardcarp. Many years ago I read Stanford's 'Musical Composition' in which he stressed the superiority of 'true intonation', showing how , even in western tonal music, the tuning of a note differed according to the prevailing harmony. The spread of equal-temperament keyboards and atonal music, which assume equal intervals and hence only one tuning for each note, blunted all this .


It could be argued that music becomes less interesting as a result; though, of course, relatively few people can tell the difference.

I had an interesting encounter with an old gentleman who had a set of LPs of a pirated transfer of the 1950 Salzburg 'Fidelio' (Flagstad/Patzak/Furtwangler). He wanted to know who the orchestra was (Vienna Philharmonic). He then said that it was a semitone flat all through. I complimented him on his sense of pitch and guessses that the cause was the motor on that particular tape machine used to make the copy. When I got home I checked my EMI CD reissue and found it was transferred at A=440.

An old friend of mine had perfect pitch and had to use a turntable with continuous speed adjustment, as he heard some recordings in, say, C#major instead pf C major.

[RichardB]

(Possibly the programme brought Equal Temperament confusingly into the argument. Western 'classical' music from say 1550 onwards still uses the diatonic scale as we know it without bothering too much about Equal Temperament, the latter being a compromise solution to the fine tuning of keyboard instruments.)

That's true, but still even the most unequal kinds of temperament used for Western classical music are pretty close to equal temperament compared to systems in use elsewhere. For example, in Balinese music each gamelan orchestra uses its own tuning, which of course is built into the instruments that belong to each orchestra, and to varying extents each octave in the orchestra's range is tuned slightly sharp relative to the one below, which is a defining feature of the sound of that music even for those who can't identify exactly hat is going on. The use of microtonal ornaments in Arabic and Indian musics is well known too, and in various African musics like the vocal polyphony of the Aka people, some pitches (what would be called tonic and dominant) are fixed while pitches involved in smaller melodic movements are very flexible. Of course these are all features that can't be expressed easily in Western notation or realised on Western keyboards, and the global standardisation of those things is presumably a prime factor in the "shrinking music biodiversity" you mention.

Those of us who integrate such features as the aforementioned into new compositions, partially in the interest of opening listeners' ears to the richness of the possible continuum of pitch and harmony, though, are accustomed to being ignored!

[Joseph K]

and in various African musics like the vocal polyphony of the Aka people, some pitches (what would be called tonic and dominant) are fixed while pitches involved in smaller melodic movements are very flexible.

This sprung to mind:

[Serial_Apologist]

This sprung to mind:

Well sourced!

[cloughie]

When I first saw the heading I thought ‘500’ or maybe ‘Panda’ to go on the back of the Winnebago, then I read it again!