Pentatonic Musical Scale
Pentatonic
Many western musicians when hear of pentatonic immediately
think that it is a foreign musical scale and automatically refuse trying to
understand it.
The fact is that pentatonic is a musical scale that has
only 5 notes in it (C, D, E, G, A in C major - the same scale in A minor just
shuffle the notes around A, C, D, E, G) yet manage to become one of the most
fundamental and dominant musical scales in the world (including the western
world in the past).
Pentatonic scales have been used by most civilizations and
still widely in use in many parts of the world mostly in traditional, folk
music.
Strangely enough, recent rock lead guitarists have suddenly
rediscovered pentatonic and have used the scale in the lead guitar licks of many
famous rock songs.
So what make pentatonic scale so effective and attractive to
musicians throughout history?
Let's start with the most fundamental reason:
pentatonic sounds great because it has no semitones (e.g. B to C interval) or
tritones (e.g. F# to C interval) dissonances. This means that music played
in pentatonic scale naturally sounds good as all the notes go very well
together. If worst come to worst, one may have a slightly major-second
dissonance (e.g. from C to D). However, this slight dissonance is needed
to make pentatonic music interesting otherwise it would be boring with no
dissonance at all.
Most if not all musical scales in the world are created by
a series of fifth intervals. Starting with C, the next fifth from C would
be G, the next fifth from G would be D, the next fifth from D would be A, the
next fifth from A would be E. So what have we now? C, G, D, A, E.
Isn't that C, D, E, G, A, the pentatonic scale in C major?
Why stop at pentatonic? Why can we go to the next
note in the sequence, the fifth of E, which is B? Adding B will add a
semitone dissonance (from B to C) and adding the next fifth (F#) will add a tritone
dissonance (from C to F# and from F# to C), to an
otherwise perfect scale. Also there is the question of how far one would
go. In the western world we went on and on until we "discovered" the
"circle-of-fifths": C, G, D, A, E, B, F#, Db, Ab, Eb, Bb, F, C. Shuffle
all the notes around you will find all the notes in our modern diatonic scale:
C, Db, D, Eb, E, F, F#, G, Ab, A, Bb, B. But then the 12 semitones and 12
tritones in diatonic scale were so complex they require fairly complex rules to
focus only on 7 notes at any given time.
Furthermore, most western musicians has heard about the "circle-of-fifths" but
most music teachers forgot to tell you that in
reality, there is no circle-of-fifths but only the infinite "spiral-of-fifths" (the C at the
end of the so-called "circle-of-fifths" is not exactly the same as the starting
C!). In other words, the scale we are using today is not natural nor
perfect but compromised for the sake of the "circle-of-fifths". One can
read more about this by doing a search on just-intonation, equal temperament
(this is what we use today), mean tempered and other tuning systems.
So instead of going on and on and have to deal with the
"spiral-of-fifths" and creating complex rules for the dissonances, many
civilization prefer to stay with the natural pentatonic scale where all the
sounds go well together.
To sum up pentatonic is very popular throughout
music history due to some fundamental characteristics:
- It is a natural scale (that makes it universal)
- It is not compromised (such as the equal temperament
scale we used today in modern western music)
- It has little dissonances
- It is simple enough for improvisation yet complex
enough for most occasions
For laymen, the main reason for the popularity of
pentatonic is that "it is easy to play, great for improvisation and it sounds
great no matter how you play it" and this fact has been proven again and again by the
rock lead guitarists who have re-discovered pentatonic in the past couple
decades and gave us those wonderful lead guitar licks.
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