Logseq/Entity/Music/Scale/Discussion
Music Scale Discussion
- Why scale pages put the family noun first, nest by the scale's name, carry no fixed tonic, and leave ragas to pages of their own.
The family noun comes first
- Variants nest under the noun they qualify: Music/Scale/Minor/Natural, Music/Scale/Minor/Harmonic, Music/Scale/Minor/Melodic and Music/Scale/Minor/Hungarian sit together under
Music/Scale/Minor, and the two pentatonic scales under Music/Scale/Pentatonic. The namespace view of a family then lists every variant of it, and the variants sort next to each other. - Music theorists treat natural, harmonic and melodic minor as one family: Music/Scale/Minor/Natural describes them as teaching forms of a single minor mode from the common-practice period, and the
Minor segment in their paths keeps them together. - The alternative was to name each page in English word order directly under
Music/Scale, as Music/Scale/Natural Minor. It matches how device menus print the names, and it splits the minor family across the alphabet: Harmonic Minor, Melodic Minor and Natural Minor sort under H, M and N.
The nesting follows the scale's name
- A scale whose common name qualifies another scale's name nests under that scale, wherever its pitches come from. Music/Scale/Dorian/Ukrainian is the fourth mode of Music/Scale/Minor/Harmonic and sits under Dorian, and Music/Scale/Dorian/Bebop sits under Dorian as well.
- A reader looks a scale up by the name a manual or a teacher gives it, so the page path follows that name.
- Derivation makes a poor basis for the path, because one scale often derives from several parents. Ukrainian Dorian is Dorian with a raised fourth and also a mode of harmonic minor. A scale page names every scale it derives from, in the first line under the H1 and in links from its body.
Scale pages carry no fixed tonic
- One page holds the scale on every tonic. C major is the major scale on C, and a piece or a key in C major links to Music/Scale/Major.
- A page per tonic would repeat the same history, use and quirks twelve times. What differs between tonics is only the starting pitch, and
scale-semitones-above-tonic:: records the pitches relative to whichever tonic is chosen. - Each page's first line spells the scale on C so the reader can read its intervals.
A raga has a page of its own
- A raga carries characteristic phrases, ascent and descent rules, emphasized notes and a time of day on top of its pitches, so two ragas can share every pitch and still differ. A scale page records only the pitches and their names.
- V. N. Bhatkhande grouped Hindustani ragas under ten parent scales, or thaats, in the early twentieth century. A thaat is a pitch collection, so each thaat gets a scale page, as Music/Scale/Marwa and Music/Scale/Todi do, and a raga page links to the scale page of its parent thaat.
History