Re: [Harp-L] Should the blues scale be revised?

["Mox GOWLAND" <mox.g@xxxxxxxxx>]

Re: [Harp-L] Should the blues scale be revised?

not necessarily, but here goes :

1 #2 #3 #4 5 #6

bet this doesn't help!

tho'

in relation to the use of the major/minor third choice I tend to agree with 

<< 2. Listing the flat 3rd as a part of the blues scale is just an
attempt to describe that scale with terms of the European notation
system. In fact it's not the flat 3rd (or minor 3rd) that's part of
the blues scale though, but it's the blue 3rd. The blue 3rd doesn't
have a specific pitch, but can vary in pitch and alter the character
of the tune. Since it's somewhere between minor and major 3rd the
blue 3rd to some point covers both notes and works with both played
in accompaniment.
While we lack a possibility to notate a blue 3rd using the European
notation system we notate it as flat 3rd, but the major 3rd is
actually part of it, too.>>

 and, 

for those of you who have not already read it, 

I would like to repeat  :

(Please may I quote from "The Craft Of Musical Composition" by Paul Hindemith first published in 1937;)

 

 

<.we may examine a little more closely the thirds that exist in the lower part of the overtone series. 



Within the first 11 overtones alone there are five different sizes of thirds: 

 

4:5 the major , 

5:6 the minor , 

6:7 the under-sized , 

7:9 the over-sized , and

9:11 the one which is between major and minor, . (blue third? ndrl.)



To these we may add the Pythagorean third, which we can easily calculate,  and which is between 4:5 and 7:9 in size. 



The ear not only hears all these as thirds; it permits itself to be hood­ winked still further by this beautiful but characterless interval.



 If we play on the violin or other appropriate instrument a third that is as small as it can be without being a second, and if we then slide the upper tone up to the upper boundary of the third, just below the point where it would become a fourth, we cannot say just where

the change from a minor third to a major third takes place..>



or, as my old bass playing buddy, Steve York (hi Steve) so succinctly put it :



>I like to call this the"ambiguous third".<

 

Food for thought, n'est pas?

Mox



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