I was listening to bagpipes for St. Patrick’s Day. As a musician, I started thinking about why it is that certain modes/scales/chords are associated with certain cultures?
Why is the pentatonic scale so prevalent in Japanese music? Why is the bagpipe (which plays, to my ears, a Mixolydian scale) associated with Scottish/Irish music? Or Middle Eastern music, with its flatted second and sixth (C Db E F G Ab B C for example) so specific to these regions? Does it have to do with instruments or the capabilities of such instruments? Or is there some cultural phenomenon that makes these modes/scales make sense in these contexts? Like, what about Japan or its culture makes the pentatonic scale their preferred form of musical expression? Likewise for the others.
I know it’s a broad question, like why is music music? Those who know my questions on this forum know I tend to try and create stories and explanations for things that just might not have them. But I am very curious to know not how music evolved, but WHY it evolved in the directions it did. Does the music reflect the people or a characteristic or facet of the culture? If it is arbitrary, it seems strange that I can’t imagine hearing “Asian” music (e.g. Arirang, famous folk song of Korea) anywhere but Asia. Likewise, I can’t imagine hearing “Scottish” music (e.g. Scotland the Brave, famous folk song of Scotland) anywhere but in Scotland.
What’s the Straight Dope on the relationship of musical styles and scales and how and why they evolved so differently? How are people from one country or culture conditioned to find their style of music beautiful and meaningful?
I would imagine that it’s due to isolation of different cultures prior to the Industrial Age. Once a culture started to make music in a particular way, a corpus of music would build up on that basic system, and a cultural inertia would set in. There wouldn’t be as great a scope for innovation once the instruments and the music had evolved together.
For example, take the pipes. The Great Highland Bagpipes have only 9 melody notes, and the drones always play the same notes (low A and double low A). That instrument will produce a certain sound, and cannot play a lot of other music.
As well, as you’ve noticed, the chanter for the pipes plays a close approximation of the Mixolydian scale, which is a limiting factor, since other instruments, like the guitar, fiddle and keyboards have a much broader range. There aren’t a lot of instruments that play well with the GHB. The drums are the exception. The GHB is all melody, no percussion or dynamic beat. The drums are all about dynamic beat, not melody, so the two instruments complement each other well.
More generally, Celtic music (Scots and Irish) evolved in a lot of cultural isolation from the rest of Britain, let alone Europe. By the time European classical scales developed, there was an extensive corpus of Celtic music, designed for the harp and the pipes. Some of it transferred easily to the fiddle, the accordion and the tin whistle, but it wasn’t favoured by the cultural elites in Britain, so it has always remained on the fringes and distinctive.
Oh, and responding to your comment about the bagpipe being Scots/Irish - there are a lot of other bagpipes out there, across Europe and into the Middle East. Historically, they were common in the Medieval period. For example, the Miller in the Canterbury Tales played a one-drone bagpipe. There were bagpipes in Wales and France, Spain and Central Europe. However, they tended to be pastoral instruments, meant to be played outside. They got marginalised as the elites moved indoors and wanted the latest music from Paris and Italy in the Renaissance. But you will still find other types of pipes if you look, in Brittany, Spain, Hungary and other nooks and crannies of Europe.
That depends on where one lives. In Spain, those are associated with Asturias and Galicia, bagpipes having traditionally been limited to those areas. Hevia holds a patent for electronic bagpipes, along with a programmer and an electronic engineer.
There are many instruments which have local use. The chistu or txistu (Spanish/Basque spelling) is a three-hole flute associated with Basque music; as it only requires one hand to be played, the same person can play a drum at the same time. I am still trying to decipher what “Myxolidian” means, not having encountered it until this thread (I’m reading up on it), but apparently the chistu uses that too.
Some of them were much more extended in previous times, but are now limited in geographical scope. The tible or tiple (Catalan/Spanish) is a type of clarinet which used to be found all over Europe but nowadays you will rarely find it outside of Catalan-speaking areas and in those it will be limited to coblas, sardana orquestras (a sardana is a specific type of round dance).
So, part of your questions seems to open a whole box of “how did instruments extend from where they were invented - or not do so.”
I have no theory training, but you may find this article helpful, Nava: Mode (music). The Mixolydian mode is one of the traditional Greek modes, somewhat like scales and keys, to the best of my knowledge. It’s said that the notes on the GHB chanter resembles the Mixolydian mode more than a classic Western scale. They are roughly: G-A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G’-A’.
The first time I played the notes on the chanter to Piper Dad, who had music training, he said, “What was that?” I said, “A scale.” He replied, “Not like any scale I’ve ever heard.”