Re: Even More out of tune

[asterion@hell.com]

Title: Re: Even More out of tune

At 7:47 PM -0500 2/7/04, David Beardsley wrote:

> In 12 tone equal temperament, IT IS THE
> SAME SCALE. There's
> no way anyone can spin it to make it look any different from
> reality.
> The diatonic scale (aka the major scale) has 7 modes.
>
> Learn it. Live with it. Realty.
>
> We were discussing tuning, someone gets their vocabulary tripped
> up
> and now we're off on trivial
> persuit.

You're a microtonalist (and presumably a jazzer) and I'm not, so perhaps you learned music theory and terminology according to a different system from me. I'm following the definition of "scale" as I learned it in my college music classes (exclusively from a classical point of view), as it has been used in my subsequent musical activities, and as it is defined in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. My understanding is that a musical scale is not merely an ordered set of stepwise intervals, but that it also has reference to a tonic center. Therefore you have a C major scale or an Dorian scale on D, and so on. To state that the seven diatonic modes are all the same scale is to ignore the tonal context in which they are used.

Perhaps you need to take this up with William Drabkin <wmd@soton.ac.uk>. He's the one who wrote the Grove's entry for "scale."

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