Synthetic Scale
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Synthetic Scale
In music, a synthetic scale is a scale that derives from a traditional diatonic major scale by altering of one degree by a semitone in either direction."Synthetic Musical Scales". Author(s): J. Murray Barbour. Source: ''The American Mathematical Monthly'', Vol. 36, No. 3, (Mar., 1929), pp. 155-160. Composer Ferruccio Busoni originally explored these scales in his ''A New Esthetic of Music''Busoni, Ferruccio (1907), translated Dr. Th. Baker (1911). ''Sketch Of A New Esthetic Of Music'', p.29-39. . and their number and variety were later clarified by J. Murray Barbour, who also proposed applying the procedure to scales of more or less than seven degrees, including pentatonic scales. These synthetic pitch collections may serve as basic melodic or harmonic material for a passage of music. However, the hundreds of available scales cause Murray Barbour to propose that, "The whole problem is of greater theoretical interest than of practical worth." Alexander Scriabin's mystic chord, ...
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Music
Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect of all human societies, a cultural universal. While scholars agree that music is defined by a few specific elements, there is no consensus on their precise definitions. The creation of music is commonly divided into musical composition, musical improvisation, and musical performance, though the topic itself extends into academic disciplines, criticism, philosophy, and psychology. Music may be performed or improvised using a vast range of instruments, including the human voice. In some musical contexts, a performance or composition may be to some extent improvised. For instance, in Hindustani classical music, the performer plays spontaneously while following a partially defined structure and using characteristic motifs. In modal jazz ...
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Pitch Collection
A set (pitch set, pitch-class set, set class, set form, set genus, pitch collection) in music theory, as in mathematics and general parlance, is a collection of objects. In musical contexts the term is traditionally applied most often to collections of pitches or pitch-classes, but theorists have extended its use to other types of musical entities, so that one may speak of sets of durations or timbres, for example.Wittlich, Gary (1975). "Sets and Ordering Procedures in Twentieth-Century Music", ''Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music'', p.475. Wittlich, Gary (ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. . A set by itself does not necessarily possess any additional structure, such as an ordering or permutation. Nevertheless, it is often musically important to consider sets that are equipped with an order relation (called ''segments''); in such contexts, bare sets are often referred to as "unordered", for the sake of emphasis. Two-element sets are called dyads, three-eleme ...
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Jazz Minor Scale
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style), ...
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Harmonic Major Scale
In music theory, the harmonic major scale is a musical scale found in some music from the common practice era and now used occasionally, most often in jazz. In George Russell's '' Lydian Chromatic Concept'' it is the fifth mode (V) of the Lydian Diminished scale. It corresponds to the Raga Sarasangi in Indian Carnatic music. It can be considered a major scale with the sixth degree lowered, Ionian 13, or the harmonic minor scale with the third degree raised. It may also be generated by reversing and rotating the succession of intervals in the harmonic minor scale. It contains the following chords, which are also considered borrowed from the parallel minor: the dominant minor ninth chord, the fully diminished seventh leading tone chord, the supertonic diminished triad, the supertonic half-diminished seventh chord, and the minor subdominant. It also contains an augmented triad. The harmonic major scale has its own set of modes, distinct from the harmonic minor, melodic minor, a ...
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Whole Tone Scale
In music, a whole-tone scale is a scale in which each note is separated from its neighbors by the interval of a whole tone. In twelve-tone equal temperament, there are only two complementary whole-tone scales, both six-note or ''hexatonic'' scales. A single whole-tone scale can also be thought of as a "six-tone equal temperament". : : The whole-tone scale has no leading tone and because all tones are the same distance apart, "no single tone stands out, ndthe scale creates a blurred, indistinct effect". This effect is especially emphasised by the fact that triads built on such scale tones are all augmented triads. Indeed, all six tones of a whole-tone scale can be played simply with two augmented triads whose roots are a major second apart. Since they are symmetrical, whole-tone scales do not give a strong impression of the tonic or tonality. The composer Olivier Messiaen called the whole-tone scale his first mode of limited transposition. The composer and music th ...
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Mystic Chord
In music, the mystic chord or Prometheus chord is a six-note synthetic chord and its associated scale, or pitch collection; which loosely serves as the harmonic and melodic basis for some of the later pieces by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Scriabin, however, did not use the chord directly but rather derived material from its transpositions. When rooted in C, the mystic chord consists of the pitch classes: C, F, B, E, A, D. This is often interpreted as a quartal hexachord consisting of an augmented fourth, diminished fourth, augmented fourth, and two perfect fourths. However, the chord may be spelled in a variety of ways, and it is related to other pitch collections, such as being a hexatonic subset of the overtone scale, lacking the perfect fifth. Nomenclature The term "mystic chord" appears to derive from Alexander Scriabin's intense interest in Theosophy, and the chord is imagined to reflect this mysticism. It was coined by Arthur Eaglefield Hull in 1916."Skryab ...
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Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (; russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин ; – ) was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy. He is often considered the main Russian Symbolist composer and a major representative of the Russian Silver Age. Scriabin was an innovator as well as one of the most controversial composer-pianists of the early 20th century ...
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Music Theory
Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory". The first is the "rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation (key signatures, time signatures, and rhythmic notation); the second is learning scholars' views on music from antiquity to the present; the third is a sub-topic of musicology that "seeks to define processes and general principles in music". The musicological approach to theory differs from music analysis "in that it takes as its starting-point not the individual work or performance but the fundamental materials from which it is built." Music theory is frequently concerned with describing how musicians and composers make music, including tuning systems and composition methods among other topics. Because of the ever-expanding conception of what constitutes music, a more inclusive definition could be the consideration of any sonic phenomena, ...
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Pentatonic Scale
A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave, in contrast to the heptatonic scale, which has seven notes per octave (such as the major scale and minor scale). Pentatonic scales were developed independently by many ancient civilizations and are still used in various musical styles to this day. There are two types of pentatonic scales: those with semitones (hemitonic) and those without (anhemitonic). Types Hemitonic and anhemitonic Musicology commonly classifies pentatonic scales as either ''hemitonic'' or ''anhemitonic''. Hemitonic scales contain one or more semitones and anhemitonic scales do not contain semitones. (For example, in Japanese music the anhemitonic ''yo'' scale is contrasted with the hemitonic ''in'' scale.) Hemitonic pentatonic scales are also called "ditonic scales", because the largest interval in them is the ditone (e.g., in the scale C–E–F–G–B–C, the interval found between C–E and G–B). (This should not be confu ...
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Musical Scale
In music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, and a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale. Often, especially in the context of the common practice period, most or all of the melody and harmony of a musical work is built using the notes of a single scale, which can be conveniently represented on a staff with a standard key signature. Due to the principle of octave equivalence, scales are generally considered to span a single octave, with higher or lower octaves simply repeating the pattern. A musical scale represents a division of the octave space into a certain number of scale steps, a scale step being the recognizable distance (or interval) between two successive notes of the scale. However, there is no need for scale steps to be equal within any scale and, particularly as demonstrated by microtonal music, there is no limit to how many notes can be ...
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Heptatonic Scale
A heptatonic scale is a musical scale that has seven pitches, or tones, per octave. Examples include the major scale or minor scale; e.g., in C major: C D E F G A B C—and in the relative minor, A minor, natural minor: A B C D E F G A; the melodic minor scale, A B C D E FGA ascending, A G F E D C B A descending; the harmonic minor scale, A B C D E F GA; and a scale variously known as the Byzantine, and Hungarian,''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London, 2001) scale, C D E F G A B C. Indian classical theory postulates seventy-two seven-tone scale types, collectively called ''thaat'', whereas others postulate twelve or ten (depending on the theorist) seven-tone scale types. Several heptatonic scales in Western, Roman, Spanish, Hungarian, and Greek music can be analyzed as juxtapositions of tetrachords.Dupré, Marcel (1962). ''Cours Complet d'Improvisation a l'Orgue'', v.2, p. 35, trans. John Fensterm ...
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Ferruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni (1 April 1866 – 27 July 1924) was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time, and he was a sought-after keyboard instructor and a teacher of composition. From an early age, Busoni was an outstanding, if sometimes controversial, pianist. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory and then with Wilhelm Mayer and Carl Reinecke. After brief periods teaching in Helsinki, Boston, and Moscow, he devoted himself to composing, teaching, and touring as a virtuoso pianist in Europe and the United States. His writings on music were influential, and covered not only aesthetics but considerations of microtones and other innovative topics. He was based in Berlin from 1894 but spent much of World War I in Switzerland. He began composing in his early years in a late romantic style, but after 1907, when he publis ...
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