Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, developed from roots in blues and ragtime. Jazz is seen by many as "America's classical music". Since the 1920s Jazz Age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression, it emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African-American and European-American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes and response vocals and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms"; as jazz spread around the world, it drew on national and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation.
In the 1930s arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, a hard-swinging, improvisational style and Gypsy jazz were the prominent styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music", played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines; the 1950s saw the emergence of free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter and formal structures, in the mid-1950s, hard bop emerged, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues and blues in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music's rhythms, electric instruments, amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay.
Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Afro-Cuban jazz. The origin of the word "jazz" has resulted in considerable research, its history is well documented, it is believed to be related to "jasm", a slang term dating back to 1860 meaning "pep, energy". The earliest written record of the word is in a 1912 article in the Los Angeles Times in which a minor league baseball pitcher described a pitch which he called a "jazz ball" "because it wobbles and you can't do anything with it"; the use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans was in a November 14, 1916 Times-Picayune article about "jas bands". In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, "When Broadway picked it up, they called it'J-A-Z-Z', it wasn't called that. It was spelled'J-A-S-S'; that was dirty, if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies."
The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz is difficult to define because it encompasses a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years, from ragtime to the rock-infused fusion. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, such as European music history or African music, but critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader, defining jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music" and arguing that it differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time defined as'swing'". Jazz involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician". In the opinion of Robert Christgau, "most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz".
A broader definition that encompasses different eras of jazz has been proposed by Travis Jackson: "it is music that includes qualities such as swing, group interaction, developing an'individual voice', being open to different musical possibilities". Krin Gibbard argued that "jazz is a construct" which designates "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition". In contrast to commentators who have argued for excluding types of jazz, musicians are sometimes reluctant to define the music they play. Duke Ellington, one of jazz's most famous figures, said, "It's all music." Although jazz is considered difficult to define, in part because it contains many subgenres, improvisation is one of its defining elements. The centrality of improvisation is attributed to the influence of earlier forms of music such as blues, a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of African-American slaves on plantations; these work songs were structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was improvisational.
Classical music performance is evaluated more by its fidelity to the musical score, with less attention given to interpretation and accompaniment. The classical performer's goal is to play the composition. In contrast, jazz is characterized by the product of i
Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form, originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1870s by African Americans from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs and the folk music of white Americans of European heritage. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and rhymed simple narrative ballads; the blues form, ubiquitous in jazz and blues and rock and roll, is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues as a genre is characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times, it was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, a longer concluding line over the last bars.
Early blues took the form of a loose narrative relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans. Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa; the origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is dated to after the ending of slavery and the development of juke joints, it is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century; the first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience white listeners.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music. The term Blues may have come from "blue devils", meaning sadness; the phrase blue devils may have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal". As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, "it came to mean a state of agitation or depression." By the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is used to describe a depressed mood, it is in this sense of a sad state of mind that one of the earliest recorded references to "the blues" was written by Charlotte Forten aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862.
She was a free-born black from Pennsylvania, working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and noted a number of songs, such as Poor Rosy, that were popular among the slaves. Although she admitted being unable to describe the manner of singing she heard, Forten wrote that the songs "can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit", conditions that have inspired countless blues songs; the lyrics of early traditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the so-called "AAB" pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, a longer concluding line over the last bars. Two of the first published blues songs, "Dallas Blues" and "Saint Louis Blues", were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure.
W. C. Handy wrote; the lines are sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody. Early blues took the form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, hard times"; this melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved. The lyrics relate troubles experienced within African American society. For instance Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rising High Water Blues" tells of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927: "Backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time And I can't get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine."Although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the lyrics could be humorous and raunchy: "Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, Rebecca, get your big legs off of m
Chord (music)
A chord, in music, is any harmonic set of pitches consisting of multiple notes that are heard as if sounding simultaneously. For many practical and theoretical purposes and broken chords, or sequences of chord tones, may be considered as chords. Chords and sequences of chords are used in modern West African and Oceanic music, Western classical music, Western popular music. In tonal Western classical music, the most encountered chords are triads, so called because they consist of three distinct notes: the root note, intervals of a third and a fifth above the root note. Chords with more than three notes include added tone chords, extended chords and tone clusters, which are used in contemporary classical music and other genres. A series of chords is called a chord progression. One example of a used chord progression in Western traditional music and blues is the 12 bar blues progression. Although any chord may in principle be followed by any other chord, certain patterns of chords are more common in Western music, some patterns have been accepted as establishing the key in common-practice harmony—notably the resolution of a dominant chord to a tonic chord.
To describe this, Western music theory has developed the practice of numbering chords using Roman numerals to represent the number of diatonic steps up from the tonic note of the scale. Common ways of notating or representing chords in Western music include Roman numerals, the Nashville number system, figured bass, macro symbols, chord charts; the English word chord derives from Middle English cord, a shortening of accord in the original sense of agreement and harmonious sound. A sequence of chords is known as a chord harmonic progression; these are used in Western music. A chord progression "aims for a definite goal" of establishing a tonality founded on a key, root or tonic chord; the study of harmony involves chords and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Ottó Károlyi writes that, "Two or more notes sounded are known as a chord," though, since instances of any given note in different octaves may be taken as the same note, it is more precise for the purposes of analysis to speak of distinct pitch classes.
Furthermore, as three notes are needed to define any common chord, three is taken as the minimum number of notes that form a definite chord. Hence, Andrew Surmani, for example, states, "When three or more notes are sounded together, the combination is called a chord." George T. Jones agrees: "Two tones sounding together are termed an interval, while three or more tones are called a chord." According to Monath. However, sonorities of two pitches, or single-note melodies, are heard as implying chords. A simple example of two notes being interpreted as a chord is when the root and third are played but the fifth is omitted. In the key of C major, if the music comes to rest on the two notes G and B, most listeners will hear this as a G major chord. Since a chord may be understood as such when all its notes are not audible, there has been some academic discussion regarding the point at which a group of notes may be called a chord. Jean-Jacques Nattiez explains that, "We can encounter'pure chords' in a musical work," such as in the Promenade of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition but, "Often, we must go from a textual given to a more abstract representation of the chords being used," as in Claude Debussy's Première arabesque.
In the medieval era, early Christian hymns featured organum, with chord progressions and harmony an incidental result of the emphasis on melodic lines during the medieval and Renaissance. The Baroque period, the 17th and 18th centuries, began to feature the major and minor scale based tonal system and harmony, including chord progressions and circle progressions, it was in the Baroque period that the accompaniment of melodies with chords was developed, as in figured bass, the familiar cadences. In the Renaissance, certain dissonant sonorities that suggest the dominant seventh occurred with frequency. In the Baroque period, the dominant seventh proper was introduced and was in constant use in the Classical and Romantic periods; the leading-tone seventh remains in use. Composers began to use nondominant seventh chords in the Baroque period, they became frequent in the Classical period, gave way to altered dominants in the Romantic period, underwent a resurgence in the Post-Romantic and Impressionistic period.
The Romantic period, the 19th century, featured increased chromaticism. Composers began to use secondary dominants in the Baroque, they became common in the Romantic period. Many contemporary popular Western genres continue to rely on simple diatonic harmony, though far from universally: notable exceptions include the music of film scores, which use chromatic, atonal or post-tonal harmony, modern jazz, in which chords may include up to seven notes; when referring to chords that do not function as harmony, such as in atonal music, the term "sonority" is used to avoid any tonal implications of the word "chord". Chords can be represent
Jim Ferguson
James Edwin Ferguson is an American guitarist, composer and educator. Born in Dayton, Ferguson began his early music education playing the trombone at age 7, after eight years of study, switched to the guitar at age 15, he moved to California and began his music career in the 1970s, performing and devoting serious study to the guitar. He has performed in the U. S. and abroad, is featured on solo guitar CDs showcasing his original compositions for classical guitar, has had numerous compositions published in both anthologies alongside the works of other notable contemporary composers and in publications dedicated to his works. He has written several jazz guitar instructional books, including All Blues for Jazz Guitar, he is editor. He holds B. S. and M. F. A. degrees and has taught guitar and music courses at universities in California for over 25 years, has conducted guitar and music workshops in the U. S. and abroad, has taught guitar for over 40 years. Ferguson has written articles for Guitar Player, Down Beat, JazzTimes, Fingerstyle Guitar, Classical Guitar.
As a student, he studied with George Barnes, Lenny Breau, David Tanenbaum, José Rey de la Torre. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Performance and Literature from Mills College and wrote his thesis on Darius Milhaud, he has written for The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, edited several volumes for Guitar Solo Publications of San Francisco, including an instructional series on the works of Fernando Sor, Leo Brouwer, Matteo Carcassi, Federico Moreno Torroba's Castillos de España. He compiled numerous collections of historic performances for Fantasy Records, Rhino Records, Concord Records, worked on several projects for other labels including Riverside Records. In 1994, Ferguson and Orrin Keepnews earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Album Notes for their liner notes to the 12-CD set Wes Montgomery—The Complete Riverside Recordings; the notes include a biography of Montgomery by Ferguson and interviews with Nat Adderley, Ron Carter, Kenny Burrell, John Scofield, Tommy Flanagan. Ferguson writes compositions and arrangements for both solo guitar and ensemble settings, including nylon-string guitar and flute, nylon-string guitar and contrabass.
He learned composition from Ernest "Red" Varner. In the early 1990s, he began composing. In 2004, he released Cedar & Silver. Tracks from Cedar & Silver such as "Aurora" and "Blanca" have been licensed by A&E, ABC, PBS, Spike TV, MTV India. "Brothers" was licensed by The History Channel for their special "The History of Thanksgiving." The score to "Asian Pavan" was published in the October 2005 issue of Classical Guitar magazine and was included in the Contemporary Anthology of Solo Guitar Music for Five Fingers of the Right Hand. Moonstone consists of original compositions, including six pieces from 12 Simple Jazzy Studies. Other published works by Ferguson include Film Noir—Four Scenes, "Requiem for a Fallen Artist," Four Monsters, 12 Semi-Simple Jazzy Studies, "Winedark Sea," and Jazzotica, he has performed with Paulo Bellinati, Ray Drummond, Jorge Morel, Tommy Tedesco, Ernie Watts. Ferguson has taught jazz and classical guitar and at California State University Monterey Bay, Evergreen Valley College, San Jose City College.
He has given private lessons, conducted workshops, has appeared on radio and television. Ferguson's instructional books include examples played by him; the first book in the series, All Blues for Jazz Guitar, was named one of "100 Great Guitar Books" by Acoustic Guitar Magazine. Cedar & Silver Moonstone 24 Jazzy Studies Songs for Our Fathers, Robin Anderson Big Band featuring Jim Ferguson and former members of the Count Basie and Woody Herman big bands. Ferguson's "Requiem for a Fallen Artist" performed and recorded by Marlène Demers-Lemay on 25 Compositions, 2011. Ferguson's Four Monsters suite performed and recorded by Meredith Connie on Fairy Tales and Wild Animals, 2017. Note: Not an exhaustive list."Asian Pavan" "Sumi Dance" "Debussiana" "Chuck's Waltz" Dedicated to Charles Postlewate. "Leo's Blues" Dedicated to Leo Brouwer. "Before Six" "Study No. 1" "Study No. 2" "Study No. 3" "Study No. 4" "Study No. 5" "Study No. 6" "Study No. 7" "Study No. 8" "Study No. 9" "Study No. 10" "Study No. 11" "Study No. 12" "Cirque du Soul" "Lady Di" "Dark Streets & Shadows" "Wheelman" "Femme Fatale" "Heater" "Requiem for a Fallen Artist" "Frankenstein Meets The Jazzman" "The Raven Vanishes" "Mad Love" "The Fly" "Winedark Sea" Dedicated to JoAnn Falletta.
Jazzotica "Study No. 1" "Study No. 2" "Study No. 3" "Study No. 4" "Study No. 5" "Study No. 6" "Study No. 7" "Study No. 8" "Study No. 9" "Stu
Scale (music)
In music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale; some scales contain different pitches when ascending than when descending, for example, the melodic minor scale. In the context of the common practice period, most or all of the melody and harmony of a musical work is built using the notes of a single scale, which can be conveniently represented on a staff with a standard key signature. Due to the principle of octave equivalence, scales are considered to span a single octave, with higher or lower octaves repeating the pattern. A musical scale represents a division of the octave space into a certain number of scale steps, a scale step being the recognizable distance between two successive notes of the scale. However, there is no need for scale steps to be equal within any scale and as demonstrated by microtonal music, there is no limit to how many notes can be injected within any given musical interval.
A measure of the width of each scale step provides a method to classify scales. For instance, in a chromatic scale each scale step represents a semitone interval, while a major scale is defined by the interval pattern T–T–S–T–T–T–S, where T stands for whole tone, S stands for semitone. Based on their interval patterns, scales are put into categories including diatonic, major and others. A specific scale is defined by its characteristic interval pattern and by a special note, known as its first degree; the tonic of a scale is the note selected as the beginning of the octave, therefore as the beginning of the adopted interval pattern. The name of the scale specifies both its tonic and its interval pattern. For example, C major indicates a major scale with a C tonic. Scales are listed from low to high pitch. Most scales are octave-repeating. An octave-repeating scale can be represented as a circular arrangement of pitch classes, ordered by increasing pitch class. For instance, the increasing C major scale is C–D–E–F–G–A–B–, with the bracket indicating that the last note is an octave higher than the first note, the decreasing C major scale is C–B–A–G–F–E–D–, with the bracket indicating an octave lower than the first note in the scale.
The distance between two successive notes in a scale is called a scale step. The notes of a scale are numbered by their steps from the root of the scale. For example, in a C major scale the first note is the second D, the third E and so on. Two notes can be numbered in relation to each other: C and E create an interval of a third. A single scale can be manifested at many different pitch levels. For example, a C major scale can be started at C4 and ascending an octave to C5; as long as all the notes can be played, the octave they take on can be altered. Scales may be described according to the number of different pitch classes they contain: Chromatic, or dodecatonic Octatonic: used in jazz and modern classical music Heptatonic: the most common modern Western scale Hexatonic: common in Western folk music Pentatonic: the anhemitonic form is common in folk music in Asian music. Many music theorists concur that the constituent intervals of a scale have a large role in the cognitive perception of its sonority, or tonal character.
"The number of the notes that make up a scale as well as the quality of the intervals between successive notes of the scale help to give the music of a culture area its peculiar sound quality." "The pitch distances or intervals among the notes of a scale tell us more about the sound of the music than does the mere number of tones."Scales may be described by their symmetry, such as being palindromic, chiral, or having rotational symmetry as in Messiaen's modes of limited transposition. Scales can be described by their distribution patterns and possibilities for notation. For example, a heliotonic scale is one that can be notated with one note head on each line and space, using only single and double alterations, thus all heliotonic scales are heptatonic. Since heliotonia is a metric of a scale's tone distribution pattern, is related to evenness, spectra variation, the Myhill Property; the notes of a scale form intervals with each of the other notes of the chord in combination. A 5-note scale has 10 of these harmonic intervals, a 6-note scale has 15, a 7-note scale has 21, an 8-note scale has 28.
Though the scale is not a chord, might never be heard more than one note at a time, still the absence and placement of certain key intervals plays a large part in the sound of the scale, the natural movement of melody within the scale, the selection of chords taken from the scale. A musical scale that contains tritones is called tritonic (though the expression is used for any sca
Diatonic scale
In western music theory, a diatonic scale is a heptatonic scale that includes five whole steps and two half steps in each octave, in which the two half steps are separated from each other by either two or three whole steps, depending on their position in the scale. This pattern ensures that, in a diatonic scale spanning more than one octave, all the half steps are maximally separated from each other; the seven pitches of any diatonic scale can be obtained by using a chain of six perfect fifths. For instance, the seven natural pitches that form the C-major scale can be obtained from a stack of perfect fifths starting from F: F—C—G—D—A—E—BAny sequence of seven successive natural notes, such as C–D–E–F–G–A–B, any transposition thereof, is a diatonic scale. Modern musical keyboards are designed so that the white notes form a diatonic scale, though transpositions of this diatonic scale require one or more black keys. A diatonic scale can be described as two tetrachords separated by a whole tone.
The term diatonic referred to the diatonic genus, one of the three genera of the ancient Greeks. In musical set theory, Allen Forte classifies diatonic scales as set form 7–35; this article does not concern alternative seven-note diatonic scales such as the harmonic minor or the melodic minor. Western music from the Middle Ages until the late 19th century is based on the diatonic scale and the unique hierarchical relationships created by this system of organizing seven notes. There is one claim that the 45,000-year-old Divje Babe Flute uses a diatonic scale, but there is no proof or consensus it is a musical instrument. There is evidence that the Babylonians used some version of the diatonic scale; this derives from surviving inscriptions that contain musical composition. Despite the conjectural nature of reconstructions of the piece known as the Hurrian songs from the surviving score, the evidence that it used the diatonic scale is much more soundly based; this is because instructions for tuning the scale involve tuning a chain of six fifths, so that the corresponding circle of seven major and minor thirds are all consonant-sounding, this is a recipe for tuning a diatonic scale.
9,000-year-old flutes found in Jiahu, China indicate the evolution, over a period of 1,200 years, of flutes having 4, 5 and 6 holes to having 7 and 8 holes, the latter exhibiting striking similarity to diatonic hole spacings and sounds. The scales corresponding to the medieval church modes were diatonic. Depending on which of the seven notes of the diatonic scale you use as the beginning, the positions of the intervals fall at different distances from the starting tone, producing seven different scales. One of these, the one starting on B, has no pure fifth above its reference note: it is for this reason that it was not used. Of the six remaining scales, two were described as corresponding to two others with a B♭ instead of a B♮: A–B–C–D–E–F–G–A was described as D–E–F–G–A–B♭–C–D C–D–E–F–G–A–B–C was described as F–G–A–B♭–C–D–E–F As a result, medieval theory described the church modes as corresponding to four diatonic scales only. Heinrich Glarean considered that the modal scales including a B♭ had to be the result of a transposition.
In his Dodecachordon, he not only described six "natural" diatonic scales, but six "transposed" ones, each including a B♭, resulting in the total of twelve scales that justified the title of his treatise. By the beginning of the Baroque period, the notion of musical key was established, describing additional possible transpositions of the diatonic scale. Major and minor scales came to dominate until at least the start of the 20th century because their intervallic patterns are suited to the reinforcement of a central triad; some church modes survived into the early 18th century, as well as appearing in classical and 20th-century music, jazz. Of Glarean's six natural scales, three are major scales, three are minor. To these may be added the seventh diatonic scale, with a diminished fifth above the reference note, the Locrian scale; these could be transposed not only to include one flat in the signature, but to all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, resulting in a total of eighty-four diatonic scales.
The modern musical keyboard originated as a diatonic keyboard with only white keys. The black keys were progressively added for several purposes: improving the consonances the thirds, by providing a major third on each degree; the pattern of elementary intervals forming the diatonic scale can be represented either by the letters T and S respectively. With this abbreviation, major scale, for instance, can be represented as T–T–S–T–T–T–S The major scale or Ionian scale is one of the diatonic scales, it is made up plus an eighth that duplicates the first an octave higher. The pattern of seven intervals separating the eight notes is T–T–S–T–T–T–S. In solfege, the syllables used to name each degree of the scale are Do–Re–Mi–Fa–Sol–La–Ti–Do. A sequence of successive natural notes starting from C is an example of major scale, called C-major scale; the eight degrees of the scale are known by traditiona
Major scale
The major scale is one of the most used musical scales in Western music. It is one of the diatonic scales. Like many musical scales, it is made up of seven notes: the eighth duplicates the first at double its frequency so that it is called a higher octave of the same note; the simplest major scale to write is C major, the only major scale not requiring sharps or flats: The major scale had a central importance in Western music in the common practice period and in popular music. In Carnatic music, it is known as Dheerasankarabharanam. In Hindustani classical music, it is known as Bilaval. A major scale is a diatonic scale; the sequence of intervals between the notes of a major scale is: whole, half, whole, halfwhere "whole" stands for a whole tone, "half" stands for a semitone. A major scale may be seen as two identical tetrachords separated by a whole tone; each tetrachord consists of two whole tones followed by a semitone. The major scale is maximally even; the scale degrees are: 1st: Tonic 2nd: Supertonic 3rd: Mediant 4th: Subdominant 5th: Dominant 6th: Submediant 7th: Leading tone8th: Tonic The triads built on each scale degree follow a distinct pattern.
The roman numeral analysis is shown in parentheses. 1st: Major triad 2nd: minor triad 3rd: minor triad 4th: Major triad 5th: Major triad 6th: minor triad 7th: diminished triad If a piece of music is in a major key the notes in the corresponding major scale are considered diatonic notes, while the notes outside the major scale are considered chromatic notes. Moreover, the key signature of the piece of music will reflect the accidentals in the corresponding major scale. For instance, if a piece of music is in E♭ major the seven pitches in the E♭ major scale are considered diatonic pitches, the other five pitches are considered chromatic pitches. In this case, the key signature will have three flats; the figure below shows all 12 relative major and minor keys, with major keys on the outside and minor keys on the inside arranged around the circle of fifths. The numbers inside the circle show the number of sharps or flats in the key signature, with the sharp keys going clockwise, the flat keys counterclockwise from C major The circular arrangement depends on enharmonic relationships in the circle reckoned at six sharps or flats for the major keys of F♯ = G♭ and D♯ = E♭ for minor keys.
Seven sharps or flats make major keys that may be more conveniently spelled with five flats or sharps. The term "major scale" is used in the names of some other scales whose first and fifth degrees form a major triad; the harmonic major scale has a minor sixth. It differs from the harmonic minor scale only by raising the third degree. There are two scales that go by the name melodic major scale: The first is the fifth mode of the jazz minor scale, which can be thought of as the major scale with a lowered sixth and seventh degree or the natural minor scale with a raised third; the second is the combined scale that goes as Ionian ascending and as the previous melodic major descending. It differs from melodic minor scale only by raising the third degree to a major third; the double harmonic major scale has a minor sixth. It is the fifth mode of the Hungarian minor scale. Ionian mode Major and minor Listen to and download harmonised Major scale piano MP3s
–D–E–F♯–G
