All About Musical Scales (and How to Tune Them)

[Salmoneus]

One other aspect of gamelan scales I found from going deeper into Grove...

- the two seemingly main modes ('pathet') of the slendro scale are separated by one note (i.e. one is one note higher than the other)
- musicians often have a sense that the intonation of a specific gamelan ensemble is more suited to one mode than to the other
- the ensembles generally thought of as better-suited for a particular mode seem perhaps to be the ones in which there is a particular pattern of wider-than-equal and narrower-than-equal intervals
- this pattern is what you'd expect from the natural pythagorean scale
- I already pointed this out myself with the specific interval set I cited above, and presumed that this was due to incomplete drift from a pythagorean scale to an equal-tempered one
- but what some theorists point out is that if you have TWO scales with this pattern of intervals, you can't have them one note apart on the same five-note instrument: some of the intervals that one scale demands to be wide must be narrow for the other, and vice versa. Eg if you have a pentatonic E-G-A-C-D, this is wide-narrow-wide-narrow-narrow, whereas if you play the same notes starting one note up you get narrow-wide-narrow-narrow-wide, which is a different pattern. If you try to play the same pattern (scale) one note higher you need different notes. [in actual gamelan, apparently these are the two modes that are used, though only the two wides and the narrow between them are significant, with the other two narrows being more flexible]
- so if you try to play the same pythagorean scale one notes apart, using the same notes, you have to use compromise values of the note - the intervals have to be between wide and narrow.
- so just by trying to play these two scales on one instrument, if you refuse to add new notes, you end up drifting your intervals toward equal intonation
- in this model, equal intonation isn't the goal - the goal is to create a compromise, and a creative tension, between the demands of two different scales
- different ensembles balance these demands differently, so each ensemble has a slightly different intonation that all vaguely approximate equal tuning but never actually reach it. As a result some ensembles are 'closer' to one scale/mode than the other.

So in this model gamelan music is actually trapped in a permanent version of, essentially, the crisis of tuning that gripped Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, which I'm "currently" describing in the main current of this thread (rival meantones, which will later compete with rival well-temperaments, and finally pure equal temperament). It's just that in Indonesia the problem arose "earlier" - when only five tones were used, and before advanced mathematics was invented. Why did it arise earlier? Probably the effect of gongs that i mentioned earlier - they make precise tuning harder and less useful anyway - and also just the fact that gongs are fixed-pitch instruments that are easier to make than European keyboards so became dominant much earlier. [cf. Ugandan xylophones]. A heavy role for fixed-pitch instruments may be a prerequisite for this sort of push for compromise (and eventually equal) tunings.

[Creyeditor]

This sounds much more convincing than 5tet all of a sudden showing up as the ideal music in peoples' heads.