Notes not in the chromatic scale?

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

I was eading through Dansm’s music theory website (http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~desmith/guitar/chords/theory.htm), and came across this paragraph:

The figure below shows the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. These are the only notes used in Western music. Notes such as D# and Eb represent the same pitch and are called enharmonic equivalents. Different enharmonic equivalents are used in different scales; the sharp is used for sharp keys (e.g. F# major), and the flat is used in flat keys (Ab major).

Surely this implies that non-western music has notes which do not make up the western chromatic scale.

What are these notes, and what styles of music, regions and instruments are they used in?

[pulykamell]

You’re talking about microtonal music. Modern composers occassionally use intervals smaller than the half-step, and certain ethnic music, especially Indian music, routinely uses intervals not regarded as distinct notes by Western ears.

Thing is, you hear microtones all the time, but our ears have a way of “rounding off” the sound to the nearest half step, if that makes any sense. For example, in blues, the “blue notes” (flatted third, flatted fifth and flatted seventh) are often not sung spot-on. The flatted third, esp, often wavers between the minor and the major – part of the tension of the blues.

Bagpipes are also slightly outside the normal Western tuning tradition. The major seventh is a bit flat, and the fourth a bit sharp. That’s part of the reason it grates on people’s nerves.

Also, and this is slightly outside the scope of your question, but the equal-tempered chromatic scale is a relatively recent phenomenon (well, last 100-150 years.) The system has been a 12-tone system for quite awhile, but the tunings within the system have varied greatly. When you play anything through the Romantics these days (not those Romantics…Beethoven, Liszt, etc.), the music you hear sounds a bit different than they would have back in the day.

[Musicat]

Ancient ethnic music has little in common with western musical heritage, and sounds strange to western ears. Some Turkish scales used 1/4 tones and even 1/3 tones, Arabic music had an 18-tone octave, for example.

Even (ancient) Oriental scales that do not divide the octave in as many parts do not always sound “right” to western ears, as the derivation of the pitches uses a different mathematical and philosophical method. Here is a rather technical discussion about this. In brief, one ancient chinese scale would be similar to our modern C,D,F,G,A, but the exact pitch of the D,F,G and A does not match western tunings perfectly, tempered or not.

Some modern western composers and performers are experimenting with microtones; Wendy Carlos, John Cage, many others. I just heard the Minnesota University’s Wind Ensemble play a modern piece, the title and composer of which I forget, that included not only 1/4 tones, but bowing on the edges of vibraphone keys – an eerie sound.

Ethnomusicology is not my strong point, but you can find a vast wealth of it on the Internet, including some fascinating sound files. Start with a bit of googling.

[The_Great_Unwashed]

*Originally posted by pulykamell *
**Also, and this is slightly outside the scope of your question, but the equal-tempered chromatic scale is a relatively recent phenomenon (well, last 100-150 years.) The system has been a 12-tone system for quite awhile, but the tunings within the system have varied greatly. When you play anything through the Romantics these days (not those Romantics…Beethoven, Liszt, etc.), the music you hear sounds a bit different than they would have back in the day. **

The Oxford Companion to Music states

It will doubtless shock some readers to learn that despite all this propaganda on behalf of equal temperament from 1550 onwards some great English piano-making firms of nearly three centuries later had not adopted it. Broadwoods did so only in 1846, so that one may take it that up to that date none of their clients, if keen-eared, could play through Bach’s ‘48’ with any satisfaction, to say nothing of Beethoven or Chopin, with their many keys and free modulations

Which suggests that equal temperament was perfectly well defined by the time of JSBach(1685-1750), and, that his music and the music of the Romantics required it – that is, there is no forgotten or unused “other” tuning with which to hear Beethoven “properly”, which you state.

If you meant simpy to imply that equal temperament was not “universally” accepted in the West until recently, that’s a different thing, but given the existence of micro-tonal composers it could be argued that it still isn’t.

I’d be happy to find out that I am wrong.

[pulykamell]

Hmm…This is certainly news to me. So far as I’ve ever known and have read, well-tempered systems were in use through the Romantics before they gave way to equal temperament. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was not in equal temperament. It was in a tuning such that different keys were playable, but the ratios between intervals were not exactly the same. These differing ratios are partly the reason for the characteristics of different keys. G minor sound different from C minor not just because of its different pitch, but because they also had differing tonal relationship. A minor sixth in G was different than a minor sixth in C.

This is what I’ve been taught and I’ve read. Somewhere I even read a quote stating that Mozart thought his piano pieces should never be played in equal temperament. Yes, equal temperament was known back then, but had more detractors than supporters.
I’ll be back with more concrete info.

[pulykamell]

Here’s one place which backs up my info.

In fact, western music from the time of Bach until the turn of the 20th century was not intended to be performed in equal temperament. Equal temperament is appropriate for some music of the 20th century, especially atonal music, and music based on the whole tone scale, but not for the works of the 18th and 19th centuries.

…

When we listen to their music in our modern equal temperament, we are not hearing their harmonic intentions. Key color has been lost.

…
If you don’t believe me, you can read more about it in Owen Jorgensen’s 1991 encyclopedic work: ‘Tuning. Containing The Perfection of Eighteenth Century Temperament, The Lost Art of Nineteenth Century Temperament, and The Science of Equal Temperament’. He provides ample historical and scientific evidence for these ideas. The library call number for this masterpiece is MT 165 J667

[MikeS]

<off-topic>
Musicat: The piece you mentioned wasn’t by chance “Gloriosa” by Yasuhide Ito, was it? The second movement features some kind of Japanese flute (played in quarter-tones) and a bowed vibraphone.
</off-topic>

[jovan]

Notes such as D# and Eb represent the same pitch and are called enharmonic equivalents.

You don’t even need to look at non-western or contemporary music. Try the following experiment:

On a violin, play A and E on open strings. You hear a beautifully tuned fifth. Then, play D and A, still on open strings. Another pretty fifth. Now, put a finger on the A string and play the B-E perfect fourth. Adjust the position of the finger until the tuning sounds “right”. Without moving your finger, play D-B. Now, instead of a beautiful major sixth, you get something that sounds terribly out of tune. The reason is that violin has to be played in just intonation to sound right.

If your A string is tuned to 440 Hz, then D will be at 293.3 Hz, and E at 660. A major sixth up from 293.3 is 488.8 Hz, while a perfect fourth down from 660 is 495 Hz. Hence, depending on the context, B can be two different notes.

[Small_Clanger]

As previous posters have said the “western chromatic scale” is/has been quite flexible, it’s the well tempered (keyboard) system that sets all semitones as equal. I had a Yamaha synth that offered a selection of different temprements, if memory serves some gave purer fifths others nicer thirds(?) I think you could even set it to 24 notes per octave (mmm… quarter tones).
Thing is, when you are brought up listening to main stream western style (well tempered) music you get used to all the slightly-out-of-tune intervals, the only pure interval is the octave.
Pretty much all music not played on western-style instuments (especially keyboards) will use microtones in some way.

[Dogface]

*Originally posted by pulykamell *
Bagpipes are also slightly outside the normal Western tuning tradition. The major seventh is a bit flat, and the fourth a bit sharp. That’s part of the reason it grates on people’s nerves.

It may “grate” on your nerves, laddie, but it stirs my blood.

[The_Great_Unwashed]

*Originally posted by pulykamell *
**Here’s one place which backs up my info. **

It seems I am wrong and you are right, here’s another cite supporting your assertion.

Research by Jorgensen and others strongly indicates that from 1700 to1900, the age of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, et al, a style of tuning was in use that was more complex than those which came before or after. The Well Temperaments of this period differ profoundly from Meantone or Equal.[my italics – TGU] Not only do they allow full modulation, they create a predictable variety of consonance and dissonance, providing an acoustical palette of tonal “colors” for the composer’s use.

And another.

An error in Groves Dictionary of Music [that some say must have been intentional] is also thought to have contributed to the commonly believed misconception that Well-Tempered Tuning and Equal Temperament are synonymous. THIS IS NOT TRUE. The two terms are, in fact, mutually exclusive. Many history, culture and science books have repeated this error [tsk! and now me – TGU].

::storms off to write snotty letter to Oxford University Press::
::but spins on his heels::

Originally posted by jovan
On a violin, play A and E on open strings. You hear a beautifully tuned fifth…

But only if you’ve already tuned the blooming thing that way, yet if you intend to accompany a piano (for instance), or play in a modern symphony orchestra the open strings should be tuned to equal temperament intervals.

[Jpeg_Jones]

Back to the OP:

Specifically, you may be interested in Gamelan, from Bali or Java. They use two different scale systems called Pelog (7 notes) and Slendro (5 notes), all of which sound “out of tune” to western ears.

[Chronos]

As another example: You know how there are alternate fingerings for the same note, on brass instruments? For instance, the note in the middle of the range with open fingering (on tuba, this is F, but I think it varies for different instruments) can also be played with fingering 1-3. The sound is almost the same, but not quite exactly. But I’ve never seen a piece of Western music (or any other music, but my experience is almost exclusively Western) which distinguished between those two sounds.