Stalking the Wild Pentatonic: A guide to using pentatonic scales for improvisation and composition.
I was drawn into the field of pentatonic music because of my interest in Asian culture. Like many westerners, I was repulsed by things in my own culture that I saw as bad and was also just trying to be different. I was looking for alternatives.
Because of the Beatle's visit with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and George Harrison's popularizing of Krishna consciousness, a lot of people thought they saw those alternatives in the East, whether or not they actually existed there.
After the images and sounds of George Harrison and other westerners playing the sitar, and Ravi Shankar playing in America, many of us acquired a deep and lasting impression of how things could be done radically different and still be just as good or perhaps even better than how we had been doing them.
I'll never forget the day I heard a classicist argue that pop music was intellectually inferior because classical music had progressed from 7 note scales through massive key changes and chromaticism to a full blown lack of a central note and that popular styles were still using archaic pentatonic scales invented by cavemen.
On the surface the argument might seem logical but the value most people get from music isn't from it's complexity or it's place on a manufactured evolutionary scale.
The oldest bone flute in the world has four notes of what could fit into a minor scale, though its not clear if any of the other notes of the scale were present. Ethnomusicologists consistently denounce any attempt to imply an evolutionary progression in music especially one trying to be as universal as that.
To me the main value of music to society is not in aesthetics, it's in building communities and strong bonds between members and in teaching how to live well in the world regardless of what it sounds like. So, the question becomes, can the pentatonic scales find happiness in the land of the snobs?
There are a lot of reasons why someone might want to use a pentatonic scale and classical composers continue to resort to them as well.
Your music can benefit whether you improvise or compose classical or punk by studying the pentatonic scales and taking them seriously.
I was drawn into the field of pentatonic music because of my interest in Asian culture. Like many westerners, I was repulsed by things in my own culture that I saw as bad and was also just trying to be different. I was looking for alternatives.
Because of the Beatle's visit with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and George Harrison's popularizing of Krishna consciousness, a lot of people thought they saw those alternatives in the East, whether or not they actually existed there.
After the images and sounds of George Harrison and other westerners playing the sitar, and Ravi Shankar playing in America, many of us acquired a deep and lasting impression of how things could be done radically different and still be just as good or perhaps even better than how we had been doing them.
I'll never forget the day I heard a classicist argue that pop music was intellectually inferior because classical music had progressed from 7 note scales through massive key changes and chromaticism to a full blown lack of a central note and that popular styles were still using archaic pentatonic scales invented by cavemen.
On the surface the argument might seem logical but the value most people get from music isn't from it's complexity or it's place on a manufactured evolutionary scale.
The oldest bone flute in the world has four notes of what could fit into a minor scale, though its not clear if any of the other notes of the scale were present. Ethnomusicologists consistently denounce any attempt to imply an evolutionary progression in music especially one trying to be as universal as that.
To me the main value of music to society is not in aesthetics, it's in building communities and strong bonds between members and in teaching how to live well in the world regardless of what it sounds like. So, the question becomes, can the pentatonic scales find happiness in the land of the snobs?
There are a lot of reasons why someone might want to use a pentatonic scale and classical composers continue to resort to them as well.
Your music can benefit whether you improvise or compose classical or punk by studying the pentatonic scales and taking them seriously.
