Music introduction on 06/29/08

You may have seen the stories going around the Internet about black notes music. One YouTube site in particular has attracted a lot of attention. The site features a beautiful rendering of “Amazing Grace” and discusses black note music as originating with early American slave music. While this is partly true, it is also partly urban legend.

It is highly unlikely that slaves would have had access to pianos when they were composing their spirituals and other music. So, it is unlikely that they intended any kind of symbolism related to the black notes on a piano in their music. What is verifiable, however, is that much of what is called slave music uses the pentatonic scale (more about that later). Then, when white composers, who most likely did have access to pianos, began to write ‘white spirituals’, they probably used the black notes on a piano in their composition processes. ‘Amazing Grace’ is an example of a white spiritual. (For more about that tale, Google John Newton and Amazing Grace.)

The pentatonic scale was the perfect vehicle for slave music because it is so effective in “build(ing) the power and pathos of the Negro Spirituals with their unique West African Sorrow Chant sound.”

www.associatedcontent.com/article/607531/amazing_grace_use_only_black_note.html

“A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five pitches per octave in contrast to an heptatonic (seven note: do re mi fa so la ti) scale such as the major scale. Pentatonic scales are very common and are found all over the world, including but not limited to Celtic folk music, Hungarian folk music, West African music, African-American spirituals, American blues music and rock music, Sami joik singing, children's songs, the clarinet music of Epirus in northwest Greece and Southern Albania, the tuning of the Ethiopian krar and the Indonesian gamelan, melodies of Japan and China (including the folk music of these countries), the Afro-Caribbean tradition, Polish highlanders from the Tatra Mountains, and Western Classical composers such as French composer Claude Debussy.”

“The pentatonic scale occurs in the melodies of popular music: for example in "Ol' Man River" or "Sukiyaki". It is also a staple ingredient of film music, where it is used as a shorthand to signal primitive or exotic contexts. With suitable changes in orchestration it can be used to depict an Oriental setting, a scene with American Indians, or a rustic hoedown. An example of film music in which both the East-Asian and American-Western elements of the story are suggested in the melody is the title theme for The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao.

Composers of Western classical music have used pentatonic scales for special effects. Frédéric Chopin wrote the right hand piano part of his Etude Op. 10 no. 5 in the major G-flat pentatonic scale, and therefore, the melody is played using only the black keys. Antonin Dvorak, inspired by the native American music and African-American spirituals he heard in America, made extensive use of pentatonic themes in his "New World" Symphony and his "American" Quartet. Giacomo Puccini's “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot” allude to the pentatonicism of Japan and China respectively. Maurice Ravel used a pentatonic scale as the basis for a melody in "Passacaille", the third movement of his Piano Trio, and as a pastiche of Chinese music in "Laideronette, Emperatrice des Pagodes", a movement from his Ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose). Bela Bartok's “The Miraculous Mandarin” and Igor Stravinsky's “The Nightingale” contain many pentatonic passages.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale