Today we're going to move away from the first dimension of

music that we've been looking at,

which is duration, or time, and begin to work with

the second, which is pitch, and melody.

And here's an initial question for you.

Think of the texture of music and think of these strands of

high and low.

Where does melody sit in the texture?

Is it high, middle or low?

Where is it?

If you think about it conceptually,

try to figure out, well, I got this board up here,

this tapestry, or whatever,

where's my melody going to be in the texture:

high, middle or low?

Michael?

Student: It would be high.

Prof: Yeah, usually high.

Now, here's an interesting question for you,

why is it usually high?

There's an acoustical reason for this.

Why does the melody show up in the high range?

Student: >

Prof: I beg your pardon?

Student: It's easier to hear.

Prof: It's easier to hear in a high range.

Why is it easier to hear in a high range?

What about the acoustics here?

Once again, the laws of acoustics.

Why is it easier to hear in a high range?

I could play for you, for example,

a little bit of Mozart.

It would sound like this.

>

You like that?

>

Sounds better up there, doesn't it?

Why is that the case?

Yeah.

Student: Maybe you can put the frequency of the higher

pitches as high so you can detect the sound quicker and

>.

Prof: That's it exactly.

In a melody, we tend to have a lot of

rhythmic activity there.

It's got to have activity to play itself out as melody.

But because the way sound waves operate, we have these low sound

waves taking a very long time to clear.

The higher frequencies take a lot shorter time to clear.

They're short sound waves.

They clear very quickly.

So, we can hear a melody--we can hear a melody more clearly

in this higher register and therefore,

there is always the tendency to have the bass play long,

low notes because those sounds take a long time to clear and

melodies play faster notes because those sounds clear

quickly and we can hear and enjoy the melody.

All right, that's just an opening thought about why

melodies show up in the top part of the texture.

Let's talk about melody here and let's talk about pitch.

We said before that in Western music we have musical notation.

And musical notation is relied on more in Western music than

any other musical civilization around the world.

And in the West, this whole idea of pitch

notation goes back to the ninth century,

when the monks and nuns in Benedictine abbeys in

Switzerland and France and Germany and northern Italy

started doing this; they started marking on

parchment or slate the general course of a melody.

Eventually, what they did was to separate these lines into

more discreet places, or more discreet pitches.

Then around one thousand in northern Italy,

an enterprising fellow named Guido of Arezzo came along and

said, "Well, you know what?

I can get this to show us how far up we are supposed to go,

by placing it on some kind of grid here,"

and this is this-- as I said before,

the beginning of the first graph in the history of the

West.

This grid of horizontal lines (and we will know that if we're

going from here to here), it's got to be exactly this

frequency, or at least this space.

So, initially they came up with four lines and then eventually

five and even six, and then they went back to five

by the fifteenth century.

What they also did around the year one thousand was to

identify--to label--these particular spots--spaces and

lines.

So they began to call this A and this B and this C and this D

and this E, this F, this G.

When they got up here, they stopped.

Why did they stop?

Why didn't they keep right on going with G,

H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P?

Why don't we sing Ms and Os and Ps today?

Why did they stop?

Any ideas?

>

Roger?

Student: >

Prof: Yeah, they had this thing--they hit

this thing called the octave.

And, of course, there's this--another

acoustical phenomenon here we've talked about before,

what's the relationship within an octave?

The string is vibrating higher when it's exactly twice what the

lower one is .

So, they heard this and they heard this as essentially all

one sound.

So, if it's a duplication of sound, let's duplicate the

letters.

But you can look at manuscripts of the early eleventh century

and see people singing Ps and Ls and Os and Ms and things like

that.

But eventually, they began to uniformly adopt

this system of what's called "octave duplication."

And every musical culture around the world--

and I've talked with ethnomusicologists about this

particular point-- every musical culture around

the world, Chinese, Japanese,

Indonesian, Indian, African whatever,

they all use this phenomenon of octave duplication in their

music-- octave duplication in the music.

But how they divide up this sonic space within the octave

can vary rather considerably.

Some Arabic music seems to have as many as fourteen gradations

within the octave.

Now, we're going to listen to a piece of music here from the

tradition of classical India and I thought we might have a sitar

player in here.

Somebody--I got wind of the fact we might have a classical

Indian musician in our class, somebody that had studied the

sitar and might be able to come in and play one for us.

But we don't have that, so we're going to use something

on our CDs by the world famous sitarist, Ravi Shankar.

Okay, you've probably heard of him.

He's actually quite old now.

He must be--surely he's in his eighties.

He was very famous when I was in graduate school tons and tons

of years ago.

So--but he is the venerable sitar player.

And here is the pattern, the raga.

We'll call it a scale.

It's not really a scale but a raga that he is using.

It's got only six notes within the octave.

>

Prof: And the six notes are-->

--that particular pattern.

Doesn't sound like any scale we've ever heard of.

So, let's listen to Ravi Shankar play a bit of a raga

using a six-note scale.

>

Okay, so that gives you a flavor of that and you have

that, of course, on your CD number six,

fifteen.

So that's a bit of sitar music.

Now, we're going to play another six-note scale.

Let's go onto that one when Lynda gets set.

And this, of course, is sung by Nora Jones.

And, as you know from reading the textbook,

why do I mention Nora Jones?

Or why do we play Nora Jones right after Ravi Shankar?

Student: It's his daughter..

Prof: It's his daughter.

Isn't that interesting?

Every Saturday morning I'm going through Stop 'N Shop and

there's Nora Jones in the background playing.

I'm going down the pasta aisle or whatever, and I have the

daughter of Ravi Shankar over my shoulder.

What a world, huh?

So, we're going to listen to just a couple of seconds here of

a blues tune sung by Nora Jones.

>

Okay, so we'll just cut off here.

But what she's working off of here--we're not going to listen

to the whole thing--is this idea of a blues scale.

>

And so on. How's that operate?

One, two, three, four, five, six.

With this one, sometimes major and sometimes

minor.

We'll come back to that part.

So, that's another six-note scale but a different sort of

pattern, a different kind of pattern.

It's a blues scale pattern.

It's kind of between the major and minor that we'll talk about

a little bit later on.

So, two different forms of a six-note pattern,

let's go to a five-note pattern.

If you've ever visited parts of Indonesia--

which I have not--and if you've ever visited parts of China--

which I have not--I am told that you will hear this kind of

music.

It's played by a traditional Chinese instrument called the

erhu.

This I have seen around the world many times and heard.

It's a two-stringed instrument that produces a particularly

beautiful, vibrant tone.

So, we're going to listen to an erhu playing.

I think this is track--if you want to pursue it,

it's track--six-CD--track sixteen.

Let's listen to an erhu play a melody by a traditional Chinese

composer-- we call him in English

"Abbing" and you can read about him

there in your textbook.

>

Okay, so let's see--let's pick that up.

>

Five notes within the octave just there.

So, it's a penta--what we call a pentatonic scale.

And that's used in a lot of Far East cultures--the pentatonic

scale, just a five-note scale there.

Okay, so we have--there's a whole idea of octave

duplication--sometimes six notes, sometimes five notes.

We in the west have settled on a seven-note scale.

Why did that happen?

Well, we have this idea of a seven-note major and seven-note

minor.

Why seven notes?

Well, for the answer to that we have to go back to ancient Greek

music theory, and when you read about

this--it's really turgid stuff-- but believe it or not,

I teach a course on this at the graduate level.

We have to read--poor Lynda has to take this kind of

stuff--reading Aristoxenus and things like this.

So, what we're dealing here with is a situation where the

ancient Greeks were very much into mathematics as a way of

explaining the world and explaining music in particular .

And they thought these ratios were primary.

So, they had the ratio of two to one,

which gave them the octave, and three to two,

which gave them the fifth, and four to three,

which gave them the fourth.

They also, because the system worked out better for their

purposes, then jumped to nine to eight, which gave them the whole

tone.

So, they started out there and let's say they were working down

here.

They filled in the octave up above and then they filled in

the fifth and then they filled in the fourth and then they came

down a whole step and then they went up a fourth from that whole

step and then up a fourth from that,

and they were filling in in this fashion.

Interestingly enough--and you ever wonder this?--sometimes

somebody will wander by a keyboard and say,

"That's odd."

What's the great oddity about the keyboard?

What's strange about this keyboard?

It's very asymmetrical, right?