Mapping Music 6. CHORDS
Pursuing our grand space metaphor, here is an important new term: CONSTELLATION — a group of pitches occurring in a perceived relationship, either vertical (a chord simultaneity), horizontal (a segment of a melodic line), or diagonal, a combined collection of pitches from various lines sounding in temporal proximity. This is intentionally a broadly inclusive concept.…
Mapping Music 5. SCALES
What is a scale? Its essence is an interval pattern, selecting which pitches out of the entire chromatic possibilities become scale steps. Successive interval arrays are a vivid way to describe its pattern: SCALE PATTERN — periodic interval pattern that cycles through each octave, defining which pitch-classes from the 12 possibilities are degrees of the…
Mapping Music 4. TUNING
“To understand the Universe, you must understand the language in which it’s written, the language of Mathematics.” — Stephen Hawking Galileo revolutionized astronomy, in part by using a new tool: the telescope. Schoenberg revolutionized harmony by evolving an existing concept, the chromatic scale, into a new tool: the 12-tone scale, and devised a new compositional…
Mapping Music 3. CHANGE
Harmonic rhythm is the pace at which chords change in common-practice tonal music. Often in songs or simpler instrumental music, the harmony changes periodically, like once every measure or every half-note or every beat. Even when the rate of chord change is this uniform, it often accelerates approaching a cadence at the end of a…
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MAPPING MUSIC 