This is truly a can of worms....

Without convoluting the question too unnecessarily, this is true only in some genres and styles, mainly western music. You may or may not wish to look any of these up. None of these are a small study and I have tried to summarize.

For example, if you went to India you might find the Raga and the 12 Swarasthanas more common, or to some Arab countries, the Maqamat scale structure is more common. If you follow microtonal music that is an entirely different area and arena. Then if you go into tone rows it is different again. If you follow contemporary Classical music you will find many rules broken and unusual scale formats. If you love jazz, you will find the modal aspects and BeBop scale structures along with tri-tonal scale structures and reharmonization implied by lines or scales bearing no relevance, as well as the seven modes you speak of, and several different approaches that are outside what would be considered the default. In Popular music is where your statement is the most relevant.

Additionally to stay on topic, there are modes in the Hebrew scale, The Maqamat, Indian music and in Asian music.
MODES create familiarity and a method to aid and associate scale/Harmony/Chord relationships in its simplest answer. BUT they are not the only ones that prevailed,...

EDIT Addition: The Harmonic Minor scale has 7 modes but without names Mode 1, Mode 2, Mode 3 etc etc. While people often associate it with Spanish-oriented music, if you compare it to Hebrew and Arabic scales and modes, you will find some similarities. It is the usage of any mode that matters not the constructs as someone mentioned. Some people associate modes with the Diminished Scale as well. Realistically, they are to be used and played. Analysis is something you use when you have to transcribe it and teach to others and not that useful in spontaneous performances where too much thinking becomes a hindrance instead of helping.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 27, 2020

I am just taking the piss - so please don't get offended.

@Imprint,, You say... "But only the true musician understands music’s final cause: its ultimate nature, purpose and function"

So, please do tell, oh wise master, what is music's 'final cause', its ultimate nature, purpose and function?
Us mere mortal composers and players are yearning for that extra missing wisdom
that only daft prats like Arry Stotle can pretend to provide.

Arry Stotle - a true legend - contributed lots to philosophy by pontificating fantasies and never doing reality checks.
Famous for articulating the attitude of "I, Arry, think it's true - therefore it must be so"
He's (allegedly) the guy that believed women, being the inferior sex, had less teeth than men.
How hard could it be to do the science - excuse me miss would you mind just opening your mouth?

If Arry was alive today and commenting on music, it wouldn't be as a composer, or a player, or a producer;
that would be too real.
It would be as a vacuous music critic, too practically incompetent to get his hands dirty and create something.

p.s.,
I do like your underlying implied assertion that music is rich enough to embrace all of our interests, at whatever level we like.
But I'm very cynical of elevating wonky philosophy, especially teleological purpose, to the top of the game.
In the music domain, I think hands on practical art and craft pisses all over philosophy every time.
(and I say that as someone who genuinely likes philosophy)
Music critics that can't play a note, but know how to be opinionated and know how to woffle about music's ultimate purpose,
are especially pathetically nauseating!
Rant ends...

 

Last edited: Aug 27, 2020

I think both are needed eventually. The former breeds the latter though.

We can only point to it, brother. Yet maybe you are focusing on my finger that points.
The answer is within you. (Well, an answer which is relative to where you are at, and transient anyway.)
The universe has a law, Dharma, and it concurs nicely with our earthly templates of music and sound, and all energetic interactions in nature and us. Compare the waves of light and sound. Then compare how certain frequencies work, or not, with other frequencies.
Then look at how people resonate or not with each other...
Music and learning an instrument are one of the tools for self-awareness, so if you stick with it you may eventually relate it back to the self and see what you need to. You may even find an answer which will make you happy. But everything is transient, and we need to realise we'll never know it all, and just be happy with that.
Best I can do for you! You can't tell another anything! It doesn't work like that. It's experiential.
Interested to see what new member @Imprint says!
Already digging that person's presence!
I think this is a nice person! Hoorah!

 

Hmm ... have they prevailed? Other scales are common in other parts of the world, and Major/Minor was mostly a European thing .... until colonialism started affecting things

 

Funny you should mention that. That's exactly how I first understood music as a toddler in the 60's. "Doe, Rae, Me, Fa, So, La, Te, Doe"

 

With your additional guidance, this humble apprentice is edging closer to the required revelation.

@Imprint said...

1. Final cause
2. Formal and material cause
3. Efficient cause

The instrumentalist, vocalists and producers know only the efficient cause of music
(the mechanical production of sounds, like a worker who builds a house).

The composer, however, knows the material and formal causes of music,
what a composition is made of and how it is put together
(much as does the designer or architect of the house).

But only the true musician understands music’s final cause: its ultimate nature, purpose and function
- the reason, why the house was built in the first place.

So, I will climb this ladder to reach the dizzy heights of being a True Musician

I start my journey at lower level 3. the 'efficient cause' - the lowliest level.
For this, I can just rip off a bunch of samples and loops from all those muzo types,
what you call the instrumentalists, vocalists, and producers.

I progress to level 2. of my journey - the 'material and formal cause'
For this, I can just get my AI-driven DAW to cough up some composition in whatever genre I want.
I will train myself to press the right button - oh master, this is so exciting - I now have a 'skill'.

And finally - level 1. - the 'final cause' - the supreme 'True Musician level.
Having categorised all the boring level 3 and level 2 stuff as 'beneath my contempt',
my mighty ego is now free to run amok establishing this 'final cause'
- the supreme ultimate reason why I bother to play this music game at all.
So that would be...
I want to ponce around as a vacuous dead-head celebrity, with a fan base of thousands of adoring worshippers,
many of whom are gagging to help me get laid as often as possible.

I have finally seen the light, I am at last a True Musician. I have arrived.

 

As long as you can press the buttons in the correct order on Ableton Push, you're a True Musician!

 

I'll take a stab at answering this toward the spirit in which I think this question was asked ("why is major-minor common practice in Western music"), and I'll try to do it as clearly as possible.

The concept of modes originated when people were more focused on melody. As people became more focused on harmony, the properties of the chords which can be formed from any given mode became more important. Therefore, the modes which had the most musically usable, sensible, and desirable chords became the most important.

For example: Locrian has no perfect fifth above the root, so we can quickly eliminate that mode from being a prime candidate, as the perfect fifth is such a desirable chord.

Then you have Dorian which potentially ends up being "bittersweet" because of the minor third and major sixth. It's a bit neither here nor there.

lbnv already touched on this with the phrase: "Most established and definite" and the fact that they are the most contrasting. Ionian and Aeolian are very musically useful, clearest in the moods, and also make the best emotional bookends of happy and sad. I guess you could argue that being the most musically useful and clearest in moods are two sides of the same coin, but that's another conversation.

 

Why do you techies always make it so difficult.
... the buttons. (plural) ... in the correct order

Simpler please... ONE button --> press it once --> big noise --> groupies
and I want that single button cracked on sister site.

Is this site really audiosex or just a bloody scam?

 

@Ad Heesive and @Smoove Grooves greatly appreciate and grasped the significance of your views but just give me some time or more time to answer.

 

In humor, I just watched Bill & Ted Face the Music.
Apparently it is to save the world. While that would be something amazing, the statement that justifiably prompted your question being 'a true musician', is two words strung together to elicit a response that cannot be defined because the statement itself is undefined. To a jazz musician, John Coltrane might be it, to a rock Musician, Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton or Steve Vai, to a classical musician Stravinsky or Mozart etc etc... Is a musician that studied and played for 40 years any less a true musician than any member of The Beatles who never studied fully and made billions of dollars from Pop music and vice-versa? Personally, no, but to some people, they may see it differently,

 

Exactly!
The mantel of 'Master' is given,not chosen!

Of course! That is why we are here now.
And we chose the practice of music as our vehicle, medium, & weapon!

 

Except that Aeolian is almost never really used in actual classical music. It depends on the composer, but it's usually mixture between different minor scales or straight up melodic minor.
Locrian is the least useful to the point that it's unusable, unless you are after some kind of weird "blues" mood; the next one in terms of unpopularity is Lydian, which found some use only in 20th century jazz and film music (usually in family comedies, but not only there).

 

More to the point, the word does not need a multiplier modifier in front of it.
Neither do the words 'justice' or 'correctness'.

 

Last edited: Aug 29, 2020

Call me crazy but I'm sure the question can be answered without quoting classic philosophers and spiritual leaders.

 

I do sometimes out loud, I just don't write it!

edit: And I'm agreeing with the fact that the answer shouldn't have to involve all that weirdness!

 

Last edited: Aug 29, 2020

I wouldn't know... I hear stuff in my head, then I try to reproduce it with my instruments. Sometimes I need to change the tuning. It could be a Zimbabwean scale for all I care, just want to make it sound like I "heard" it.

Be yourself, and just do it. Like Dave Grohl says.

It is rather useful to know that there is a music theory, though. This knowledge gives you basics with which you can experiment and build your style upon.

 

Since no one's brought it up yet I take it this isn't one of that 'foster' fellow's troll threads? heh.

I'll give my semi edumacated on theory opinion. As one guitar teach said, 'resolution is everything'. As long as you can phrase it all nicely, you can play any damn note you please, scales be damned, as long as you resolve to a strong chordal tone, with the chords root note being the strongest obviously.

Whereas sticking more or less to prescribed scale patterns, will impart a 'flavor' to the ear....there's those familiar scales that give them spanish, gypsy, middle eastern, asian or country, blues type sounds for example.

But all that is about soloing. Scales, the chords derived from them and their use in making music is another story

 

You've never experienced the tease of failure of resolution; or been deceived by a minor key masquerading as a major? It's interesting if you know theory and you pick it up. You appreciate the piece (or hate it) on a slightly different level. If your theoretical knowledge is lacking you might pick something odd up and like/dislike it without being able to explain it in scholarly terms.

I don't think it really matters.

As for the question: I'm not gonna attempt it in my current state but, yeah it's fair enough to ask, and I think enough hints and links have been thrown around to give the OP something to think about for a long, long time should they choose to dive down the academic rabbithole.

 

The composer-theorist Fred Lerdahl has persuasively shown in two books (Tonal Pitch Space - very heavy going - and more recently Composition and Cognition - an overview and introduction to his theoretical ideas) that the diatonic scale satisfies certain conditions for human cognition that render it more understandable than other pitch collections...including the modal versions of the diatonic scale, but also things like the octotonic scale and the full chromatic scale. His very detailed analysis is fully convincing for tonal music...less so for other kinds of musical syntax. Nowadays we tend to hear "modal" music as a sort of suspension of standard tonal functioning, which lends to it a great deal of interest. But our expectations of the standard tonal procedure (esp II-V-I) underlies all this. Only with non-tonal music do we hear the musical dimensions that formerly only supported tonal functioning now emerging as primary to a composition's conception: orchestration, timbre, asymmetical rhythm, free phrase structure, spatialization of sound. All to the good.