Blues hearing (was pentatonic hearing (was: Otonal / Utonal))

Hi monz,
On Sat, 15 Oct 2005, you wrote:

...[snipt]
> > > Blues sounds decidedly un-pentatonic to me. I'd say a
> > > good scale for producing a vaguely bluesy sound is
> > > Orwell[9]; not that it's a blues scale, but all those
> > > 7/6s give it a sort of blue note feel. Isn't that
> > > what you need for blues--a few blue notes?
>
> Blues is founded essentially on the minor pentatonic scale
> -- to take the simplest example: A C D E G.
>
> Just try a little improvising with that scale, making sure
> that you keep the tonic on A, and not C or another note,
> and what you play will probably already sound quite bluesy,
> even in 12-edo.
>
> The way blues guitartists play the blues, they basically
> fret those 5 notes, and then apply strategic pitch-bending
> wherever they feel that it belongs, most usually bending
> up the minor-3rd and the 4th ... and remember that on the
> guitar, the bending only goes in one direction: up.
>
> And the blues was originally (back in the late 1800s)
> a strictly vocal music, so the guitar style evolved
> after the manner of the vocals, which we know is free
> to roam wherever the singer wants it to.
>
> A blues scale typically played by keyboard players
> would be: A C D D#/Eb E G G#/Ab. Those chromatic notes
> are simply an analgoue of what the guitarists do,
> since you can't bend notes on a regular piano.
>
>
> > I play 7/6, which raises a few eyebrows but is generally
> > accepted. Monz found 19/16 used as a blue note. But the
> > general definition in practically all the literature
> > (I don't know any exceptions) speaks about neutral thirds
> > and sevenths. Guitarists play it like that.
> >
> > I've asked before and do it again: Who brought up the
> > notion that blue notes are septimal intervals, or are
> > extra low thirds?
>
>
> I'm certain that the idea that blue notes are septimal
> ratios comes from the fact that in the blues, *every*
> chord is a dominant-7th chord.
>
> This is fundamentally different from Euro-style
> "common-practice" usage, where the dominant-7th chord
> is a dissonance which must be resolved, and typically
> only appears as the "dominant" (V), with the root of
> the chord on the 5th degree of the diatonic scale ...
> or it functions exactly like that in cases where a
> different chord has chromatic substitutions.
>
> In blues this is not the case. *Every* chord is a
> dominant-7th chord, and none of them set up the kind
> of tension-->resolution expectation as they do in
> Euro-style music.
>
> Thus, in blues the dominant-7th chord is the funadamental
> consonance. This IMO encourages the listener's ears to
> interpret *every* chord as a 4:5:6:7 proportion.
>
> So let's say we have a vocalist or guitarist jamming
> away on the A C D E G pentatonic scale with pitch-bends.
> The chords which go with that scale in the blues
> typically follow the 12-measure progression:
> A7 / / / D7 / A7 / E7 D7 A7 E7.
>
> If the listener's ear is already hearing the melodic G
> as a 7/4 above A, the melodic C as a 7/4 above D, and
> the melodic D as a 7/4 above E, and with all the bending
> going on, the guitarist and vocalist may indeed be
> *playing* those notes lower in pitch so that they
> really *are* septimal intervals.
>
> If the D is approximately a 4/3 above the tonic A, and
> the C is approximately a 7/4 above the D, then when the
> A7 comes back around, that C will be heard as a 7/6.
>
> So that's my theory on why theorists persist in claiming
> that septimal intervals are important to the blues.
>
> Of course the real situation is much more complicated
> than that. Old-school (i.e., Delta) blues musicians
> didn't know anything about Western music-theory, and
> played and sang whatever damn notes they felt. For an
> example of the richness of notes available to them, see:
>
> http://sonic-arts.org/monzo/rjohnson/drunken.htm
>
> The tonic of this piece is D. The scale Johnson used
> in his vocals in this song is interesting in that,
> if you try to describe it in terms of 12-edo or meantone,
> you basically get: D F# G G#/Ab A A#/Bb B C C#.
> So it's essentially a chromatic scale, but with a
> big gap between the D and F#. But it could still,
> with less accuracy, be notated and performed simply
> with D F G A C, and it wouldn't really sound "wrong".
>
> And keep in mind that this tune is one of Robert Johnson's
> *simplest* performances. Given all the time i spent on
> analyzing this, i wish i had done _Hellhound On My Trail_
> instead, which is mind-boggling in its pitch complexity,
> considering that it's just one guy playing a guitar and
> singing.
>
>
> -monz
> http://tonalsoft.com
> Tonescape microtonal music software

In this one post, I think you've managed to convey an
excellent potted history of the blues and its realisations
on some major instruments. It would form a good back-
bone for an encyclopaedia article on the blues. More
particularly, as it references your instructive analysis of
Robert Johnson's "Drunken hearted man", it's very
appropriate for a _microtonal_ encyclopaedia article.

Regards,
Yahya

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