This week, Karen answers a listener’s questions about the history and purpose of scales in music. Why do we use scales? Where did the come from? Let’s find out!
For her sources, Karen pulled a lot of information from the Wikipedia page for what the musical scales are, so I’m going to drop those here before I start posting videos. If you go to this wikipedia page for what a scale is, you can look at the section for “types of scales” and see the different types like chromatic, nonatonic, etc like we talked about in this episode. If you want a deeper read on what those are than what Karen gives here, I suggest going and reading about them here.
From me, if you want to hear a little example of lots of different types of scales, this page will give you a tiny example you can listen to.
This page gives you an overview of the history of music throughout many different cultures.
This is the Divje Babe Flute, which was made using punching holes in the femur of a cave bear and was thought to be made by Neanderthals as a form of musical instrument. Click the image to read about it.
Here’s a lovely video of Ljuben Dimkaroski from the European Music Archaeology Project playing a reconstruction of the bone flute.
This is a page about the Hurrian Hymns, which are the oldest surviving substantially complete work of notated music in the world. It was written in cuneiform on clay tablets excavated from the ancient city of Ugarit. Click the image to learn more.
If you want to hear a reconstruction of the Hurrian Hymns, here’s a nice long Youtube video where people played them. We listened to the one starting at 24.57
Here is the page about the Natya Shastra, the Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts, containing 36 chapters with a cumulative total of 6,000 poetic verses.
Here is a really informative video of how to sing the gamakas which are essential melodic embellishments, turns, and oscillations used in Indian classical music. This is a really interesting and short video to help you hear the turns in the scale that we were talking about. It won’t let me embed it, so here’s the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIPraIlSmIk
The monk who is considered the founder of what is now considered the standard music staff was Guido d’Arezzo, and he lived from about 991 until after 1033. This music notation to the left is from about the 1300s. Click on the image to learn about how we got from early notation to what we have now.
Here’s a video about Guido if you want to hear his story.
And Karen looked up this list of Open Source software if you want to get into making music but don’t know how to play an instrument.
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