The Development of the Major and Minor Scales as We Know Them
In part one, we said that tonality is a language, one that governed almost all music composed between 1650-1900. We also demonstrated that a tonal composition begins in a home key, moves through other keys (articulating those moves with cadences) and then returns to the same key. What does this mean and how does it work?
As long ago as antiquity, music theorists sought ways to classify particular melodies according to their salient characteristics and patterns of pitches.
In the medieval era, preexisting chants were classified based on what note it began and ended on, (the final); what note was used for recitation, (the reciting tone); and the range (highest and lowest notes) of the chant. Chants that shared the same finals, reciting tones and range were grouped into eight modes. By classifying chants into modes, cantors could maintain a musical unity throughout the Mass and provide for clean transitions from one chant to the next. The names for the individual Medieval modes were derived from a misreading of a similar concept in Ancient Greek music theory. For the Greeks, different modes were associated with different moods,
Not surprisingly, singers in the Medieval period understood melody in a different manner than singers today. Instead of thinking in terms of scales (the Do-Re-Mi of "The Sound of Music) and the relation of individual pitches to "do," singers thought in terms of hexachords, six note collections. Medieval theorists understood there to be three hexachords. One was a hard hexachord, the durus, from the latin for hard; the other was the soft hexachord, mollus, and the third was the natural. The hard and soft take their names in relation to each other. Each pitch was an independent entitiy and defined as such. As in a polyphonic texture there wasn't a strong sense of one pitch being more important than another. The pitches of the three hexachords were:
Listening to these three hexachords you can hear a strong similarity between them. This is because they share the same pattern of distances between individual notes. You can see this by looking at the illustration of the piano keyboard above. On the keyboard above the distance between each note (whether black note or white note) is known as a half-step, or semitone. Thus the distance from C to C# equals one half-step, similarly from E to F, or G to G#. The distance from A to B equals two half-steps or one whole-step, similarly from C to D or E to F#. The distance from E to G# equals two whole steps and so forth.) The three medieval hexachords share the same intervallic (distance) patterns: W-W-H-W-W (W stands for whole step, H for half step).
The hexachords sound different from each other because each pattern begins at a different place. Similarly in mathematics: the series 3, 4, 7, 11 shares the same relationships as the series 5, 6, 9, 13, though they begin at different numbers. Returning to music, a folk song, for instance, Row, Row, Row will sound similar and have the same shape although it begins on three different pitches.
Row, Row, Row Version 1: beginning on C
Row, Row, Row Version 1: beginning on F
Row, Row, Row Version 1: beginning on D
Each version of the melody sounds the same because although it may have a different range (high note and low note) it shares the same pattern of intervals. Singers will choose to begin on a particular pitch because of where a melody fits within their own range.
When medieval and renaissance singers were confronted with a melody - such as L'Homme Arme - that used more notes than could be found in a single hexachord, they simply moved from one hexachord to the other in their mind. So by combining two hexachords they could conceive of a gamut (collection) of ten notes, the final three duplicating the first three an octave higher. Thus:
Or as a singer thought:
and so forth. This method was very helpful for singers as it provided a flexible system to cover almost all chants; chants seldom had a range larger than ten pitches.
Nonetheless, singers often had difficulty moving from one hexachord to another and had particular difficulty moving from the pitch F to the pitch B or vice versa (the two "fa"s). Composers tried to avoid this interval - known as the tritone, because it comprises three whole tones, or colloquially the "devil's interval" - in both melodies and simultanities and was considered horribly dissonant. Moving from most any other note of the scale to another in a melody (e.g. C to G or A to B or F to E) was considered consonant.
To combat this interval, singers emplyed an elaborate system of altering pitches (from F, say, to F#) known as musica ficta ("false music") to avoid this tricky interval. The details of this system are still not fully understood. Often musica ficta was employed at cadences, but could happened everywhere else a tritone occured.
In the example below, the same melody is played without and then with an altered cadence. Pay particular attention to the end of each musical phrase. The second time the phrase sounds more "modern" to our ears, while the first sounds somewhat more archaic.
Play Ficta example.
In practice, musica ficta mainly affected only two modes, those in which the tritone was particularly prominent: the Dorian, traditionally built on D: (D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D) (play) and the Lydian, traditionally built on F: (F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F). (play) In consistently altering the note "B" by replacing it with a "Bb" - recall the hard hexachord had a B-natural and the soft had a B-flat - in these scales in an effort to eliminate the diabolis in musica, you end up with our modern major and minor scales. The differences between the medieval modes and the modern scales are subtle, but potent.
F-G-A-Bb-C-D-E-F (F major scale) (play) Compare to Lydian mode
D-E-F-G-A-Bb-C-D ( D minor scale) (play) Compare to Dorian mode
With the development of continuo in the early Baroque era, composers and performers began to think of scales in the Modern, tonal, scalar way instead of the medieval and Renaissance hexachord, modal way. similarly, composers began to think of similtaneities of more than two pitchs and develop rules for moving from one chord to another rather than one interval to another. Some theorists have even argues that the famous Monteverdi - Artusi debate can be thought of in terms of a movement from a Renaissance modal system to a modern tonal system. When the singers jump to the famous "Ahi, lasso!" pitch, the note they use fits in just fine from a harmonic tonal perspective, but is used improperly from a contrapuntal modal perspective.
By the classical era, the major and minor scales had replaced the earlier notions of combined hexachords and in time an entire tonal system based around these scales evolved.
All text © Todd Tarantino 2002-2012.
Not to be reprinted without permission.