Week

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Now that we've discovered that Edison was not the first to create a sound recording........ have you checked out who Nicola Tesla was?
Ok. Enough of that! Now we will take a look at some of the early styles of music from which our present rock music is derived.
There is classical European music, including Opera, Symphonic music etc. This music and the de-tuning of the keyboard allowed music to be played in any key: not just the key the composer originally wrote, but in 11 other keys as well.
Our Western music, which allows for these shifts in pitch, began with early christian chants and hymns (originally from the early Jewish converts to Christianity) Eventually, some hand signals were used to indicate certain small segments of these hymns and chants. Eventually these hand signs became written out in one form or another - and finally became the binary notation known as music. Binary because a note is either being played or not - simple on and off notations of specified pitches and amounts of time to be played. Music is probably the original binary notation. Today, our computers use the binary system to do incredibly complex computations. (Perhaps music notation really IS the universal language!)
In America, where many came to avoid religious persecution, the music of these different Christian denominations was brought with the new settlers. Another thing brought to America was slavery. Usually from Africa, and considered "heathen" by the Europeans, these new forced immigramts were also forced to become Christians and forced to learn christian hyms. This worked, but only up to a certain degree because Africans had slightly different pitches in their musical scales than those European scales. This led to a hybridization of the two scales.
The African scales were, for the most part, pentatonic scales. These scales became the scales used in jazz: the so called "Blues scales" where certain notes are out of tune with the European counterparts. Let's listen to a few examples.

By 1750, the Europeans had finally settled on a scale called "Well-tempered," which allowed chromatic transposition (the music would sound the same in any key - either higher or lower than the original) Prior to to that, they had to deal with the Devil. - so just remember, the Devil in music was exorcized in Europe in the middle of the 1700s.
The natural scale (nature's scale of harmonics) are not well-tempered - some behave very badly creating what musicians call "beats" ... no! Not the beats you are familiar with in today's rock music, but beats caused by two notes which are very slightly out of tune with each other. I'll show you in class.
As far as I'm concerned, the real irony of creating the "well-tempered" scale for the European music of "harmony," was that they put everything (except the octaves) out of tune ... duh! So all of you have grown up in the unnatural system of out of tune music. It is so slightly out of tune, most of you don't realize it at all. WE all know when someone sings or plays sharp or flat, but when its very slight, most of us miss it and think everything is harmonious. Ha!
So now the African slaves learning to sing christian hymns sneak a new devil back into the music, and we have something that seems to work, but is definitely not European in its sound. People whose ansestors were from Africa can be proud that they re-tuned the worlds music, holding their pentatonic scales in honor and teaching the world a new dialect.

One more strong influence in rock music is the Scottish, Irish and English modal scales from the Middle Ages. These "modes" are today just scales of eight notes. Originally, they were scales of six notes ( Ut, re, mi, fa sol, la)