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Quotes, tales, musings: How do performers of the past and present relate to scales? How do they balance their sonic passions with the rest of life? Sourced from archives, interviews, and my own conversations with artists.

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• Music in Scales: Home •

—Quotes by Topic—

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• Miscellaneous •

Musings from various sources…

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• Q:

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Scale-vibratory variance: “The ‘cents‘ system was invented in the 1880s by the English philologist and mathematician Alexander John Ellis…[who] employed a logarithmic function to transform the geometric ratios of frequencies to an easily understood arithmetic scale. He divided the octave into 1,200 units, so [a] half-step was 100 units or ‘cents’.”

 

“Comparing music from all over the world with this new tool, Ellis discovered that tuning systems were far too varied to be explained by a mathematical theory…contradict[ing] Pythagoras and all the others after him who claimed that musical scales can be explained mathematically… Although Ellis did not employ a theory of culture, he demonstrated that musical scales are ‘very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious’. They must result from human intervention and choice.”

• (Excerpt from Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction, edited by UCLA Musicology Professor Timothy Rice)

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• Vertical inversions: “At ITC I played in a student competition that Shivkumar-ji was judging…he told me: ‘As you move upwards – higher in the scale – then tilt your head down.’ Let me explain – the Sharma family are from the mountains in Kashmir. Shiv-ji’s father taught him that as you move higher up a mountain, there is more and more to look at beneath you. And once you’re at the top, you can only look downwards. You must balance yourself – or else you will fall too quick!” (our 2018 interview)

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Socially-sourced scales: “There are at least three problems with trying to match Pythagoras’ pure tuning. First, scales are not purely tuned, which has been known for a long time. It’s also not clear to what extent [global] scales tie into the kinds of principles Pythagoras pioneered: Pfordresher cites Indonesian musical scales as an example that does not align itself with Pythagorean pure tones. The third problems rests with Pythagoras basing his theory on instruments: first strings, and later pipes.”

 

“Probably the best starting point…is to look at singing, not instruments. Maybe scales were designed as a way to accommodate how out of tune, how variable singers are. We suggest that the starting point…was probably not the tuning of musical instruments, but the mistuning of the human voice…songs [must] be understood, remembered and reproduced. To accomplish these goals, that system needs pitches spaced widely enough to accommodate inconsistencies from person to person…”

• (An intuitively appealing scale-formation hypothesis from Peter Pfordresher, Professor of Psychology at University at Buffalo)

—Rare Instruments (1944)—

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“Raga: The melodic groundings of Indian classical music, central to both the Hindustani and Carnatic traditions. To oversimplify, ragas function like ‘melodic mood recipes’: each presenting their own ‘ingredients’, such as catchphrases, note hierarchies, ascending & descending lines, and ornamentation patterns – as well as accompanying rules and guidelines for how to blend them for emotional affect. Despite this detail, ragas are much more about aesthetics than technique or theory, aimed first and foremost at summoning their own unique set of sentiments and colours. The word derives from the Sanskrit for ‘that which colours the mind’… (from my Raga Glossary)

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