Guitar: Scale Theory: An Open Learning Guide

By the ninth century Western music had become standardized into a notational form called nuemes which were shapes that represented notes. One line was used to indicate the middle pitch with nuemes above the line being higher in pitch and the nuemes below the line being lower in pitch. This primitive notational system was more of a memory aid rather than a complete notational system showing exact pitch and duration. To read nuemes you needed to be familiar with the piece of music beforehand. In the tenth century Guido d'Arezzo, a Benedictine monk and Choir Master, extended the one line to four lines and set the exact pitch of each note. This new invention of the stave allowed music to be notated more precisely. Guido d'Arezzo also devised the solfeggio system where a different syllable is sung to each note of an ascending scale:

Today a scholarly approach has been applied to the music of the past in relation to ensuring that the notation is interpreted correctly. An example is baroque music where modern research into the instruments, techniques and approach of this period has led today's musicians to revise their interpretation and performance of Baroque notation.

During the Renaissance Italian composers tried to recreate the plays of Ancient Greece and their experiments led to the invention of Opera. Musicians have always mined the music of the past for ideas and maybe some clue as to the roots of contemporary musical practices. From a musicologist point of view we are living in a Golden Age simply from the fact that mankind for the first time has the ability to record sound. Though we take recorded sound for granted today; it must be said that the future musicologist will find a rich legacy of sound recordings from which to base their research. We can never hear the music of Ancient Greece or the Medieval period; we can only attempt to recreate it. The importance of notation as the only mechanism we had for preserving the music of the past becomes self-evident.

The music up to the baroque period was created from a form of scales known as the Church Modes which took their names from the tribes of Ancient Greece.

Mixolydian - the Mixolydian mode was invented by Sappho, the 7th century B.C. poet and musician.

The Ancient Greeks laid the foundation for the study of music and intervals in a way that has defined Western music ever since. They investigated intervals using mathematics and used ratios to describe these intervals. The Church Modes are not scales from Ancient Greece. The Ancient Greeks used a scale system based on the idea of tetrachords. However the debt that the Medieval period owes to the Ancient Greeks is reflected in the naming of the Church Modes. The Ancient Greeks also described their modes as Dorian, Lydian, etc. However this shows a continuity of music nomenclature rather than practice and the Ancient Greeks used their modes in an entirely different manner to the Medieval musician. Here is Aristotle's view of the modes:

The quote above is from Aristotle's Politics which is a work about government and society and the individual's role in both. This Aristotelian analysis of music influenced the early Church fathers who sought to lay the foundations for the liturgy of the Christian mass which had always contained musical elements.

The Church Modes derive from Gregorian Chant which is a body of liturgical vocal music named in honor of Pope Gregory (590CE to 604CE) who set others to collect all the earlier Christian plainsong for codification. Pope Gregory instigated the revision of the existing liturgical music into a coherent whole and in doing so defined the musical practices of the early Christian faith. With regards to secular (non-religious) music there is not much contemporary information available for the modern reader. The church filling the vacuum left by the demise of the Roman empire became the main conduit of information and therefore the earliest substantial musical literature we have available to study is primarily to do with the musical practices of the Christian church.

As instruments and forms evolved, some of the Church Modes became redundant as musicians found that those modes did not suffice for their musical needs. A few of the Church Modes went on to form the basis of our "major-minor" system and it is from these modes that baroque musicians created the harmonic theory that has dominated music right up to the twentieth century. The earlier Ionian mode is now called the Major scale.

The keyboard layout of the harpsichord and organ became standardized in the 15th century and the invention of the keyboard played a large part in laying down the foundation of modern tuning practices and theory. Tempered-tuning was adopted as a direct result of these inventions. The earlier system of mean-tuning meant that the errors introduced by the problem of the Pythagorean Comma allowed only a few keys to be played. If a piano was mean-tuned to C major then the player would find that keys further away from this C major center would be unusable. The guitarist can hear this by tuning the guitar in the first position (first four frets) so that a C major chord is in tune with itself. You will find that the chords in the first position are usable but as you further progress up the neck the chords start to sound out of tune. Tempered-tuning spreads the errors introduced by the Pythagorean Comma evenly across the entire range of an instrument. By the time the piano was invented in the 17th century, the tempered C major scale had become the foundation for teaching music theory.

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Text adapted from Guitar/Scale Theory by Wikibooks contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. This adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.