Re: [tuning] Digest Number 3454

the ancient greeks, i believe all of them ,regardless of the ratios they used. referred to such tetrachords as

F# G Ab B as a chromatic tetrachord

>Message: 2 > Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 17:19:53 +0200
> From: "Ozan Yarman" <ozanyarman@superonline.com>
>Subject: Re: Re: Diatonic
>
>It seems to me that you are ignoring the practice to fit the definition you gave Lorenzo. D Eb F# G Ab B C D most certainly sounds to me like a diatonic scale. As a matter of fact, all maqams can be reduced to instances of one or more diatonic scales.
>
>Safiyuddin Urmewi of Baghdad also considered such intervals as Eb-F# whole tones, no matter how augmented. It would not be wrong to assume that augmented whole tones function similarly as whole tones in a tetrachord. Thus, I cannot possibly accept the claim that the above-mentioned scale in not diatonic.
>
>Cordially,
>
>
> >

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Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>
The Wandering Medicine Show
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Hi all,

I think Klaus has hit on a most important consideration -
what is your _purpose_ in using the term "diatonic"?

If your music is essentially harmonic, it's bound to mean
something different from what it does if you music is
essentially melodic. And then there are very distinct
traditions of melodic music to take into account.

In either case, there are also distinct personal styles
that make some considerations either more or less
relevant to your purpose.

However, recognising this does not at all help us to
arrive at a single, all-purpose definition of the term.
Perhaps we need to rethink whether we would not be
better served by using two (or more) terms, eg
"diatonic" for classical Greek music; "melodic" for
middle Eastern musics; "harmonic" for Western
harmonised music; etc.

Regards,
Yahya

-----Original Message-----
________________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 13:23:14 +0100
From: klaus schmirler <KSchmir@online.de>
Subject: Re: Re: Diatonic

Ozan Yarman wrote:

>Klaus, I'm perfectly aware of the role Western tonality ascribed for
melodic and harmonic minor scales. I'm also aware how Western tonality has
superceded ancient Greek theory so as to render modal configurations
obsolete in many ways. In this context, it would not be out of place to
re-define what we understand of diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic genera. I
think Daniel summed it up neatly, saying:
>
>I also understand the steps C to D-flat as diatonic, C to C-sharp as
chromatic, and C-sharp to D-flat as enharmonic.
>
>You should know that Western ears do not have monopoly over what is
diatonical and what is not. Al-Qindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Safiyuddin
Urmewi all precede Western theorists in promulgating Hellenic tetrachord
calculations. The Maqams of then and today most certainly sound diatonical
to me, in that, each instance is made up of 7 steps whose intervals function
as half-tones and whole-tones in a given tetrachord.
>
>
Well, actually I wanted to insist that Western tonality has not
superceded Ancient Greek theory, it just concerns a different music.

In Greece, diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic concerned independent
tunings with steps around 200 and 100, 300 and 100, and 400 and 50
cents. In Western harmony, the terms concern harmonic relations, and the
enharmonic relation is the difference between the diatonic and chromatic
halfsteps in a given tuning. In a modal context, I think that Greek
theory gives you a better handle in classifying tetrachords of
heptatonic scales. Western music (apart from the harmonic relations
emntioned above) essentially differentiates between music in scales,
which are diatonic except for the harmonic minor, which is explained as
having a "borrowed tone", and music which uses all the tones of 12-ET.
Middle Eastern music has steps of around 150 cents that neither the West
nor the Greeks know about, so there are probably Arabic terms going
around that fit better than the Greek ones.

Your scale with the adjacent half steps is not diatonic in the Western
of the Greek sense. Since it can be analyzed as two tetrachords with two
half steps and large second, it is a perfect chromatic scale for the
Greeks, but not to Western theory. Not being diatonic makes it a bad
scale for anybody who needs consonant chords and movement by fifths,; it
does not make it an inherently bad scale. So why call it diatonic?

klaus
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