Ah, the major tonality. The heart or our tonal universe. The tonal environment within which composers and players have created the musical sounds that have captivated the world. Cool with the basic distinction in our music of the major and minor tonalities? Click the Ying / Yang symbol to hear these two important colors paired together.
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Cool with the distinction? Depending on our emotional and artistic statement, both of the major and minor tonalities play a crucial role in all of our music of the last 500 years or so, and even further back, but back to this way distant past so few written records exist... and of course, folks just weren't getting into the studio back then, let alone mp3 files etc.
So much of the joyous music in our world is based on the various major scale groupings of pitches and in the American library of literature of the last 100 years or so, music written in the major tonality by far and away creates the largest volume of songs. For centuries banned from the formal music of European church services, due to its tendency to create joy and excitement, did the major scale's rise to prominence as the center of equal temperament announced a new era of consciousness for the people of this world?
This new and evolving consciousness, starting back in the 1600's, musically shook the world three centuries later with the emergence American jazz, the exciting results of the merging of diverse cultures in America. Things just haven't been the same since. Fluent knowledge of these major colors, both in theory and practice on your instrument, can greatly enhances one's ability to perform music that invigorates the mind, body and soul, in most of the musical styles within our American culture. The major scale grouping of pitches plays a considerable role in providing an important color for the improvising artist of American music. The historical, practical and artistic potential of this major scale grouping of pitches is giant. Pick a topic, click and explore! Academic references.
| arpeggios | "harp like" scales using the intervals of chords in their construction. |
| cycle of fifths | organizing the 12 major and 12 minor keys by the interval of a perfect fifth. |
| key signatures | collections of accidentals that identify tonal centers placed at the beginning of written music. |
| major blues scale | blues color with both a minor third and a major third interval? |
| major triads | creating lines from this ever popular group of pitches dating perhaps to the 12 century or so. |
| major pentatonic scale melodies | traditional lines created from the 5 note major pentatonic color. |
| major pentatonic scale theory | examines the intervals used to construct the major pentatonic color. |
| major scale degrees | examines each of the 7 different degrees of the major scale. |
| major scale melodies | traditional melodies created from the major scale grouping of pitches. |
| major scale interval study | common melodic ideas based on diatonic intervals of the major scale. |
| major scale theory | looks at the intervals used to construct the major scale. |
| musical intervals | examines the way we measure and numerically label the musical distance between pitches. |
| transposition | describes the process how instruments of different pitch are notated. |
| whole tone / augmented scale | symmetrical scale shape based on the whole step interval. |
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus