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[eirias]

Last night a bunch of us went to hear a couple of Kyrgyz performers; one recited a portion of Manas, their national epic, and the other played about six different musical instruments. Some aspects of their pentatonic music system were striking. There were two notes of importance: something that appeared to function as a tonic, and the notes a perfect fifth above and a perfect fourth below (if we assume octave equivalence these are both scale degree 5 -- very similar to the hierarchy of importance in Western music!). Two of the other notes mapped right onto scale degrees 2 and 3 of a major scale. However, scale degree 4 was nearly a half-step sharp from how it'd be in a Western major scale -- making a tritone with the tonic. This is all interesting to me because people like to argue about whether there is something special about certain intervals, whether maybe there is a built-in preference for small ratios; and the ones that are most often mentioned as possibly "innate" are the perfect fifth and the perfect fourth, intervals represented by very simple ratios. In some sense this system appears to be positive evidence -- and I have to tell you I was a bit bowled over by the apparently-very-similar tonal hierarchy -- but then there is this near-tritone, which is IIRC the most complex ratio possible with the Western scale, and so it's clear that even if there is a preference for certain simple intervals, there's no assumption that all scale degrees should make such simple ratios with the tonic.

(Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised, though; in pentatonic scales, which very frequently map onto subsets of the seven-note Western scale, what we think of as scale degree 4 is often omitted and replaced with what we would think of as scale degree 6. So it's clear from that that we don't start out with the expectation that "the note a perfect fourth above the tonic will be important.")

Comments

[blimix.livejournal.com]

Sounds like lydian mode.

Sure, I believe in simple ratios. But I don't believe in simple rules, so that doesn't really matter.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

True, it was similar to the first five notes of Lydian (with a slightly mistuned 4th degree).

[(Anonymous)]

So there were no notes in the upper half of the scale? (With the halfway point being defined as the fifth, since that's how we do it in Indian music.) That must be sort of limiting... although I guess if you keep your composition in the bottom half of the scale and don't really try to go any further than the fifth you can get away with it not sounding too weird.

Indian music has a bunch of pentatonic scales. One is the 1 2 3 5 6 8 that you expected, others are 1 2 3 5 7 8, 1 2 4 5 6 8, 1 low 3 4 low 6 low 7 8, and a whole bunch of others ... but typically you'll see at least one note above the 5th somewhere.

[rshruti.livejournal.com]

Sorry, did that while I wasn't logged in and didn't notice. It was me. :-)

[rshruti.livejournal.com]

Rereading your post.. I also don't think that the distance from the tonic is as important as the distance from the notes around it, particularly in a non-complete scale (such as a pentatonic scale). In scales that use the high 4th (half step below the 5th) the emphasis in compositions is its relationship to the 5th, not its relationship to the tonic or any other notes. Also it's usually a "weak" note - something that leads to another note rather than one that stands on its own. Ok... I could talk about this all day, but I've probably stopped making sense so I'll stop now. :-)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Hm, an interesting point! And pretty sensible, too, since the 5th was very clearly the second important note in the scale and the others were just basically there for show. :) It's quite true that you didn't often see "tonic - raised fourth" in the pieces he played.