I figured this was the best place to put it, so here goes.
So, what's the history of music theory and shit like that?

I mean, did all the theory/notation/scale stuff start in Medieval times? What other known forms were there that could have influenced this?
Like what was the first scale created? From what and where did it all begin?

And, how is the development of music theory linked with Christianity and the Bible in general? (Specific cases would be nice too e.g certain scales being linked with the Devil.) Was Christianity a major influence on music, or the only influnce in the creation of scales?

If this is case then, finally, if - hypothetically Christianity did not exist and some other form of power and control was in it's place, in what way would that change and influence music and music theory?

Cheerio

(fuck, yeah it's long, but this is fascinating shit - any links would be helpful too)

In one post, you managed to ask quite a lot....

"Scales" started with modes. There was no such thing as major and minor yet. It was all modal. Plainchant--or gregorian chant--was pretty much the first form of music, so basically the roman catholic church was the first to use music officially. Plainchant is of course church music, and it was started with monophony. That's like singing in the shower, one voice alone without any type of counterpoint or polyphony to accompaniment. I'm going to say that not till about the baroque era did music of the theater and court come into being. I could be wrong on that one though....

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im not sure when exactly is started but just like anything else it has evolved tremendiously (sp?) since it began

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Cheers Powers. So what is the difference between modes and scales?
For example, would this be correct?

X Mode = X Minor/Major mode?

If this is the case, when were the modes split up into major and minor scales?

Man, I guess my other questions could only be answered by a guy with a Phd in music history or something!

Edit: * tremendously
What I'd also really like to look into is what factors influenced the evolution of music.. I mean, it started pure and simple presumably by singing or tapping on drums (whatever) before Christianity, but is the expansion of music and notation into more advanced realms a benefactor of Christianity?

Argh! So many hard questions!

At any rate, Christianity had a HUGE role. Don't quote me on this, but I heard that music was banned in many places because it had such great power for mobilizing people (maybe armed people too, like in revolts or mutinies). At any rate I know that at a certain time the Roman Catholic papacy banned the use of the major triad because it was so lively ...

Though I think music took its roots long before Roman Catholicism. I think even before the Roman empire ... apparently Egyptians (and others) had some very primitive flutes.

Also, our music, Western music, is based off of the division of an octave into 12 notes. However in lots of Eastern music (think traditional Indian music for example) the octave is divided into I think 26 notes, a bit more than double what we have. That means that basically between every fret you would have another note ... that sounds complex just to think about.

Anyways apparently most of the modal stuff was developped by the Catholics, but I'm personally not to sure where we got all those other scales, like the melodic minor, the harmonic minor, the blues scale, diminished and augmented scales etc ...

It's really interesting but to find out you would have to do some research. The first place I would look would be for an intro to music history in your local library. Books are almost always better than websites for anything historical.

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About the Indian music thing, Didn't Steve Vai have a guitar constructed to play about the same? Erm, If I remember correctly he had a guitar based like that and that was how he came up with his own little scale, Xavian. Based on quarter semitones instead of half semitones, some crap like that. Don't quote me on the "quarter semitones/half semitones" thats probably not the right word for it.

Music was never "banned." BUT....the augmented second was. Once.

BB, Uhhhh, you got me wrong. A mode is a scale. Major/minor didn't exist at the time. Then one day, some dude might have been like, "hell, I'm going to call the Mixolydian mode major, and then I can put flats and sharps in the key signature." Of course, that isn't exactly how it could have started, but that's the basic jist of it. I had quite a long discussion about this with thrashboy a while back if you remember that, haha, but truely, traditional classical music started like how I've said it. Thrashboy [I think] just goes off of unorthadox'ed jazz theory, which can combine anything...

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The #4/b5 was also banned from all church music at one point. It was called the "devil's interval" or something like that because it sounds very evil. I believe it started being used again once some no name guy named..... dang, what was his name again...... oh yeah, J. S. Bach started using it....

The "no name" part being sarcasm of course, and I am pretty sure all of that information is correct. Cheers.

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wow the guy from skid row! baddass

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I thought it was the tritone that was banned, which is root b3 b5, and that it was banned in general, not just in the church

a tritone isnt b3 and b5, thats diminished, which the used all the time.

A tritone is three minor thirds. A #4, or a dim5 is a tritone.

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Hey, I hope you weren't talking about me in that. . . as unorthadox as I may be in my methods. Hence, I would guess you may have been talking about me. *didn't see a "thrashboy" on the forum* Yeah I'm blind and stoned stupid as usual. Anyways, about the whole music thing. Hendrix did a lot of things during his time that was considered to be "satanic". I believe it was during the main riff to purple haze yeah, that one was majorly evil in the olden days. At least I read that in some stupid tab book once upon a time. I'm not going to defend anything the book said, I just know they said it. Yeah, music. . . interesting. . . Why not focus more on learning music than the origin. That you can actually do rather than have a lot of rumors or ideas. You will have what is known as fact.

Modes apply to scales, depending on what mode you play in depends on what notes you flat (or in one of the modes you sharp the 4th I believe, forget what it's called though), like in one of them you flat the 3rd, which means if you were to take a scale and write out all the notes starting with the letter of the scale you are playing you would go to the 3rd note on the list and flat it (That means you move it one note down, but you don't skip the sharps).

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Wow, haha, dude, you didn't even answer his question. Good thing I did.....

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The one where you sharp the 4th is Lydian, as for the one of them that you flat the 3rd, that would apply to any minor scale. for example Dorian(II), Phrygian(III) and Aeolian(VI) all have minor 3rds. . . (flatted 3rds). In the case of Locrian it's your diminished mode or half-diminished rather(-7b5). So it also has a minor third. Anyways, yeah later.

YEa the devils interval. just it was tri-tones and augmented suspends

this a great subject,that they need on the history channel or some shit. it started with gregorian chant by the roman catholic church, in the dark ages. the gregorian chant was originally in four modes:dorian,phrygian,lydian,and mixolydian. the devils interval (C,Eb,Gb,A,C) (notice how it ends on A C), or tri tones was banned saying it was connected with the devil. augumented suspends were also banned for the same reason, it does sound evil (Bb,Gb,A)and together they scare the crap out of me.
but music dates back before those days. like in india, the vega makes clear references to their sitar. or eygpt with harmonic minor (snake charmer) shit.
music is from all over the place it would be too hard to find the exact date and place it began. music is even a very clear refernce saying that asian people and native american people are the same thing.
i hope this is anything new

also - bach is responsible for the four part church song (chorale). he made up all the rules, following bits and pieces of everyone else. his chorales are still studied because they provide very clear and audible methods of harmonizing in four voices.

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ERG, Four part vocal tone(SATB) talk about a headache and a half.

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yes. its hard to write!!

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with smooth voice leading?

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Too bad I can't figure out how to fix the scanner, or else I'd scan in a couple of my theory assignments....it wouldn't do much anyways cause they're not 100 percent.

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Western music notation started with the Gregorian chart. It was notated in fairly inaccurate lines, dashes & squiggles called neumes. They were really only useful for brushing up and remembering already learned songs.
After tyhat, Guido Monaco used a thin red line to notate music more accurately, and added other lines to make it even more so. This is the beginning of music notation. It develpoed from those roots.
Also, scales were not known of in those times-everything was modal.

The general term "western music" applies to the United States, and that is not how our music started.

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No. European music.
The world does not revolve soloely around the USA, you know.

I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like to live during the times when it was still fascinating to people that you could create sound by plucking a tensioned string. I wonder how long it was before more order was brought to sound by people like Ptolemy (Just Intonation) and Pythagoras (Pythagorean tuning). I think there might have been along period of time where each musician had his own scheme of intonation and concept of what sounds played in sequence or together made up something that was "good".

I also wonder why I prefer to listen to classical rock rather than classical music? I like both, but still prefer Beatles to Bach. Why don't I like 40's style music? I started to like the song "I've got Rhythm" after I read kept hearing about the chord progression known as "Rhythm Changes" and started listening to alot of jazz that was supposed to be using that progression.

I would like to think that there is a perfect system of music that could encapsulate all the different types of "popular" music and explain why its good. But I wonder if its just conditioning. After all people do like punk rock

I appreciate the many theorist who came up with all the scales and terms but in the back of my mind I always think of what John Lennon said "who wants to talk about music? talking about music is like talking about f...ng." He did go on to say "well maybe some people like talking about that " John described one highly credentialed and respected theorist as a "twit" and this guy was giving high praise to the music of the beatles and describing it using music theory terms like "Aeolian cadence"... John said, he had no idea what the guy was talking about.

I like to think I am more like Paul McCartney and have a respect for music theory and ideas of sound.. At the same time I think you can grow up in the house of a theorist, never learn the theory, but still absorb the ideas and produce results that amaze the experts and expand their domain of study.

What a broad topic to talk about in one thread...

Anyway, on the origin of modes; If you look at the names of the modes it gives you hints at where they came from. Can you guess what group of people were the first to use the Ionian mode? If you said "hmmm...The Ionians?" You are absolutely correct. As the Ionians traveled around playing their instruments, other civilizations would pick up the jist of things and add their own little "flavor" to their scales. The most integral modal group was probably the Lydians though (hmmm, perhaps what the Lydian Mode is named after?). The Lydians were the first group of people on earth to use coined currency, an enormous advancement. So their trade was booming (thanks also to a special snail dye production by the Phoenicians). The Lydians traveled far and wide spreading their Lydian and Mixolydian modes (and also modes they'd learned from earlier people). This led other groups to explore instruments and create "flavors" of their own. (btw this was all happening even before Roman times).

"History of The early music of Greek antiquity referred to scales in the context of scalar modes. The modes are named after cities that preferred a given mode in times past. The Greek philosopher Plato felt that playing music in a particular mode would incline one towards specific behavior associated with that mode, and suggested that soldiers should listen to music in dorian mode to help make them stronger, but avoid music in lydian mode, for fear of being softened. There is a common misconception that the Church modes of medieval European music were directly descended from this notion of modality. In fact, the church modes originated in the 10th century. Authors from that period misinterpreted a text by Boethius, a scholar from the 6th century who had translated the Greek musical theory into Latin. In the 16th century, the Swiss theorist Henricus Glareanus published Dodekachordon, in which he solidified the concept of the church modes, and added four additional modes: the Aeolian, Hypoaeolian, Ionian, and Hypoionian. Thus, the names of the modes used today do not actually reflect those used by the Greeks."

In other words, the Modes are of Greek origin.
This is Historical Fact.

Go here to see the factual source.

The Greeks didn't develop the modes. They even came before the Greek Empire.

I just know that the harpercollins college outline refers to the greek names for the modes as Medieval church modes and I know that the names are greek but I am just as sure that the modes developed before the greek empire but if wrong I don't care all that really ends up mattering is the here and the now. Wow, do I sound arrogant or what?

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We're all arrogant sometimes.
see.....


Can you say when then; and who--the first known human civilization on the face of the earth? Yeah right....they didn't last very long anyways--and it most likely takes a type of kingdom to have official music, so if at all possible the first noted music might have been like 2000 B.C. during the first Sumerian dynasty. I really doubt that, since that time just about only metal was known enough to hurt other humans for conquering. I tell you what, if I was alive at that time, I'd rather have a sword in my hand that an instrument. Greece was probably the first 'real empire' to ever think of official music cause they lasted the longest time. .....

In addition to that, ......
----->@DarkLegion--
(You're probably the first one to have info from a website--however trusting--yet you've got the meaning behind it stupified, not that it's a very bad thing...Wow, I never thought I'd be able to use that word.)

...That text you copied from the site [I think] means that our modern day "modes" were conceived from Roman/Euopean music. Yes, that article says it was derived from the greeks inot Roman literature, but it was only translated, it's not presicely taken from, (just like when languages are translated into English--they sound like a child wrote the sentence when in the original language it's actually quite significant wording) so there are always misleading information.

The greeks may have done the first modes (and I'm not saying this is fact but it's of course one way of thinking the history), but after translating them into Roman lit, and not anymore--technically our North American music is coming precisely from Roman thought, not greek.

Some good irrelevent information: Greeks were more democratic, as you can see in their statues, they're men/women are always standing straight up or something very mellow dramatic. On the other hand, all Roman statues tend to be flambouyant with......let's say the man holding the globe in his hands, or a guy reaching his arm toward the heavens whose face is perfect to the thousandth of an inch. For this itself, the Romans may have been more music-loving. But I guess that probably doesn't have anything to do with anything.....

Jesus, I drank two cans of beer while writing this....

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whoever mentiond the greeks, was on the right track, because in acient greece.
dorian, lydian, pyrgian, aeolin was provinces of greece.

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