music notation
I've been reading up on musical notation; my family's new piano isn't set up at home for a little over a week, but I have spent some time reading music, visualizing my fingers on the keys and such.
But what's getting me is how absolutely crazy the notation is... I hadn't realised how strange it all was.
There's twelve pitches to the octave. By convention, in most music, we pick seven of those twelve notes (by either the minor or major mode). We then use a five stave bar to draw the notes, which has nine or eleven or perhaps thirteen places to draw notes, depending on how you decide to count.
Of course, not everyone picks seven notes, or uses the major/minor modes even if they do. One major school of music is the chinese, and they use a five note scale. Play a song using only the black keys, and it's all chinese sounding! In fact, for any conventional major/minor key, the five keys you're not playing will make a fine pentatonic scale suitable for use in Chinese music.
It kind of freaks me out that these two cultures independantly decided on a twelve pitch scale (why is that done? to maximise the potential for harmonious and not-harmonious notes? I notice a perfect fifth for instance can occur in a twelve pitch scale, and that's useful). The kicker is that after making this interesting twelve pitch decision, both cultures then made distinct, but completely complementary, decisions about which notes of the twelve they'll actually use in a song.
Weird. I'd like to know more about how that happened.
Then there's the issue of tuning! I think my piano is even tempered, but I'm not sure. I'll find out I suppose. In the end it doesn't matter; if I ever want to play with tunings, I can just turn off the piano's synthesizer and use a computer to do it with any tuning regime I could want...
All kind of interesting. Just sharing my musings. Please correct me or expand on what I'm saying if you know more or better!
But what's getting me is how absolutely crazy the notation is... I hadn't realised how strange it all was.
There's twelve pitches to the octave. By convention, in most music, we pick seven of those twelve notes (by either the minor or major mode). We then use a five stave bar to draw the notes, which has nine or eleven or perhaps thirteen places to draw notes, depending on how you decide to count.
Of course, not everyone picks seven notes, or uses the major/minor modes even if they do. One major school of music is the chinese, and they use a five note scale. Play a song using only the black keys, and it's all chinese sounding! In fact, for any conventional major/minor key, the five keys you're not playing will make a fine pentatonic scale suitable for use in Chinese music.
It kind of freaks me out that these two cultures independantly decided on a twelve pitch scale (why is that done? to maximise the potential for harmonious and not-harmonious notes? I notice a perfect fifth for instance can occur in a twelve pitch scale, and that's useful). The kicker is that after making this interesting twelve pitch decision, both cultures then made distinct, but completely complementary, decisions about which notes of the twelve they'll actually use in a song.
Weird. I'd like to know more about how that happened.
Then there's the issue of tuning! I think my piano is even tempered, but I'm not sure. I'll find out I suppose. In the end it doesn't matter; if I ever want to play with tunings, I can just turn off the piano's synthesizer and use a computer to do it with any tuning regime I could want...
All kind of interesting. Just sharing my musings. Please correct me or expand on what I'm saying if you know more or better!