Some differences between Western and non-Western music
8. Weighing Up Scales
D
uring your school history lessons you may have learned about armies of rugged men using scaling ladders to get into castles. Similarly, in your French lessons, you probably learned that the French word for “stairs” is“escalier.” Both scaling ladders and escaliers have steps in them which help you rise from a lower position to a higher one—and both words derive from the ancient Latin word scala, meaning steps or ladder. Scala is also the basis of the word scale in a musical context: a scale is a sequence of notes arranged as a series of upward (or downward) steps which take us from one note to another. Generally a scale covers an octave. So we start at a note of one frequency and go up to a note of double that frequency.
There are lots of ways of climbing from one note to the note an octave above—and so there are lots of different types of scales. The most common one we use in Western music is the major scale and I will be explaining what that is in the next chapter. One thing I want to make clear at the moment, though, is the link between the terms “scale” and “key.”
Let’s take C major as an example. The scale of C major involves a specific group of seven different notes, but they are only called a scale if you play them one after another as a rising or falling sequence. If you use the same group of notes to produce a piece of music, the melody will be jumping from note to note in all sorts of different patterns and sequences and, as we are no longer merely playing a scale, we say that the music is in the key of C major.
The system of intervals, or musical steps, which produces a musical scale is not set in stone and is different in different parts of the world.
Traditional Indian or Japanese music does not use exactly the same intervals as European music—which is why it sounds exotic to Western ears. However, just about all scale systems follow two basic rules:
1. Scales are based on a series of intervals, which are divisions of a naturally occurring interval called the octave.
We have already seen how two notes an octave apart sound good together.
The close relationship between such notes means that, in some cases, you can accidentally produce a note an octave above the one you want. For example, if you blow a little too hard into a penny whistle or a recorder, the note you normally get is replaced by another, higher note which is exactly an octave above the usual one (you can also do this with the note you get when you blow across the neck of a bottle). If you twang a guitar string and then touch it gently halfway along its length (above the twelfth fret), the note will change into the one an octave above. Jumps in pitch of an octave occur naturally in birdsong and even in the sound of some squeaking doors, because the octave is linked to the physics of how notes are produced, as we shall see later.
This sweet-sounding, easy-to-produce interval is the basis of all musical scale systems. The octave is, however, a very big musical interval.* The range of an untrained singing voice is usually only a couple of octaves or so. It is therefore no surprise that all musical systems have found the need to divide the octave up into smaller intervals in order that we can have a variety of notes to sing.
2. Musicians don’t generally use more than about seven different notes at a time—even if the octave has been divided up into more steps than this.
We shall see that, although European (or Western) music divides the octave up into twelve equal intervals, it generally only uses chosen teams of about seven different notes at a time. These groups of seven notes are the major and minor keys, the ones used in nearly every piece of Western music you have ever heard. Each team of seven has its own name: for example, the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B make up the key of C major;
and the notes F, G, A, B flat, C, D and E make up the key of F major.
The fact that we only choose to use seven different notes at a time fits in well with research carried out in the 1950s by the American psychologist George A. Miller, who studied the capacity of our short-term memories. After testing people on their ability to remember sequences of numbers, letters and tones, he came to the conclusion that the limit of our short-term memory is about seven items. This limit of approximately seven is also common in other musical cultures. Indian musicians, for example, divide the octave up into twenty-two steps, but they also choose a group of seven notes to be the basis of any particular piece. (Indian musicians also have access to groups of secondary notes associated with their basic group of seven—as we shall see, Western music doesn’t use secondary notes because they would interfere with the harmonies we use.)
In Western music the composer or songwriter is not forced to stick to his original chosen group of seven notes throughout a piece of music; it is common to move from one key to another as the piece progresses, to add interest to the music. As there are only twelve different notes to choose from overall, and each key contains seven members, it is obvious that, if we move from one team to another, some of the notes will be in both keys. In fact, the most common key changes (or modulations) involve moving to a key which has only one note different from the key you are in.
Many of you will know that the word “octave” comes from the Latin word for “eight” and you will have heard that there are eight notes in an octave. So you might be wondering why I keep referring to seven different notes. Well, if you play or sing a full octave scale you do use eight notes, but the top and bottom ones are an octave apart and, as I said in the last chapter, notes an octave apart are musically very similar and even have the same name. So in an octave we have eight notes, but only seven different ones. For example, an octave scale of C major is C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C.
The three main things to remember about scales are:
• we need scales to enable us to memorize tunes;
• scales divide an octave up into smaller intervals—and give us a selection of notes;
• too few notes in play at any one time would be boring, and too many would be confusing.
The way we name the notes and the method by which we choose the members of each team of seven will be discussed in the next chapter.
First, I want to explain how we managed to divide up the octave into the twelve different notes from which we pick those teams.
As you can imagine, the ancient societies didn’t get out of bed one morning and arbitrarily decide to divide the octave up into twelve steps.
Music was developed by musicians who didn’t know about frequencies and such things; they just knew what sounded good. In the early days of music, more than 2,000 years ago, things were simpler than they are today. They didn’t use twelve different notes in an octave, or even seven.
They used five.