# Why don't they treat chromatic scale just like any other scale?



## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

20th century has brought a lot of attempts at atonal music, but they often include elaborate techniques (serialism, etc) used for the purpose of giving each tone in a scale equal importance, so that the piece is as atonal as possible.

I can kind of find justifications for it, such as pushing the limits of music, or perhaps such sound being appropriate for a century that has seen things like holocaust and nuclear weapons.

But from strictly musical point of view, musical, in sense of making music actually BETTER, I can't find justification, and it's more akin like being radical for the sake of being radical, rather than for the sake of accomplishing any musical goal, or expressing any musical idea.

But, why, oh why, did they skip the most natural, intuitive, simple and logical way of using the full chromatic scale, with all 12 tones: * just treating it as any other scale*.

When you write a piece in some scale, let's say B minor, what do you do:

You combine the tones of B minor (and sometimes occasional chromatic tone) in a meaningful way, trying to express some musical idea, and in most of the cases, trying to make it sound good. You try to make it coherent and musical. You mostly use just 7 tone families (7 tones, sometimes in multiple octaves).

Why couldn't exactly the same approach be used for 12 tone scale. (The only difference is that you can't add occasional tone that is outside this scale). Why couldn't people just compose normally in such a scale, trying to express coherent, musical, meaningful ideas?
The advantage of such a scale is additional freedom of using 12 instead of 7 tone families.
Disadvantage is that sometimes when you use all 12 tones it can sound a bit dissonant.
But this is also an advantage as well, because you can express more different moods and ideas when you have some dissonance.

So my approach to chromatic scale vs. regular scale would be to see it as free verse, vs. all sorts of metric verses of traditional poetry.

*Free verse means you don't have to follow the rules. Absolute freedom of expression.*

But free verse does NOT mean that rhyme is forbidden. Free verse does not mean that you can't use some metric elements. It just means that you don't have to. But you can as you please.

Why can't the same thing be in music?

Instead of embracing the full freedom of chromatic scale, they imposed new rules to themselves, which in principle banned the use of old rules, and said tones must be serial, tones must be of exactly the same importance, etc...

But it doesn't make sense.

Is there any novel in which all the characters are of the same importance?
Is there any sentence in a natural human language in which there is the same emphasis on every word?

English alphabet has 26 letters. Try writing the story in which each letter is used the same number of times. It's just silly.

I am wondering is free atonality exactly the thing that I am arguing for, or it still had some rules?
If it is, why was it shortly abandoned?
If it isn't, why hasn't anyone approached the chromatic scale in a way that I just described?

So to return to linguistic analogy:
If we compare regular scale with English alphabet, chromatic scale would be some 40 letter alphabet, for example.

So, if such alphabet was adopted, my idea would be to use all 40 letters freely, as needed, without any particular effort to give each letter the same importance, etc... Why can't we use chromatic scale in such a natural way, as a normal nice 12-letter musical alphabet?


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## philoctetes (Jun 15, 2017)

Probably because teaching the chromatic scale at the beginning is more than enough to start making music.

This is like me asking why don't they start teaching chemistry with quantum mechanics instead of Lewis structures and cookbooks... as sane as it sounds, it isn't necessary to get students to learn basic chemistry.

Before the super-symmetry in the universe broke down into the various forces and particles that we know, the universe had no bias, no order, kinda like the chromatic scale. But engineers don't need to know super-symmetry to apply the physics of particles and fields. 

Finally, I try to imagine how improvisers, or even my rock music friends, would function if they tried to talk in "chromatic" language about their music...


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

What you're actually asking is: why don't we select one note of the chromatic scale to function as a tonic (central, starting and ending) note and assign distinct harmonic functions to the various degrees of the scale? These are precisely the features that make a scale a scale; the location of the tonic note and the relation of the other notes to it and to each other. The different arrangements of these components distinguish one scale from another, but they characterize all scales. In this strict sense the chromatic scale is not a "true" scale at all, and atonal music acknowledges this.

Highly chromatic tonal music would seem already to meet your requirements. Did you have something else in mind?


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

ZJovicic said:


> If it isn't, why hasn't anyone approached the chromatic scale in a way that I just described?
> 
> So to return to linguistic analogy:
> If we compare regular scale with English alphabet, chromatic scale would be some 40 letter alphabet, for example.
> ...


You are certainly not alone in your ideas , and nothing of them has ever been abandoned . Each tonal moment follows another as an intimate relation . It's like kgopzt is a perfectly fine word . *t * is a pointy! sound and as if it says yes , this word of 5-letters is something completed . One of those letters could be considered the word's tonic . In kgopz it appears to me it's in the middle . I think its fine when the listener of this music has enjoyed the journey , feels enlightened at it's completion , and had never much more than momentary concern for it's beginning .


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Well, just as we tend to read or hear free versw as phrases and sentences that have beginnings, middles, and ends, or subjects and predicates, we tend to listen to music hamonically ("tend"), with shifting. sometimes fleeting tonal centers -- which in the chromatic scale are absent unlesss you pile notes up into chords to create these fake tonal centers, A chromatic "scale" going from C to C' is absolutely no dfferent from one going from F# to F#' and you'd never know what key you were really in -- which is really no different from 12-note music. Or from Schoenberg's immediate pre-12 note music. No reason you can't do what you propose, but it's not like it hasn't been done.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

I like the sentiment of this



> So my approach to chromatic scale vs. regular scale would be to see it as free verse, vs. all sorts of metric verses of traditional poetry.
> 
> Free verse means you don't have to follow the rules. Absolute freedom of expression.
> 
> But free verse does NOT mean that rhyme is forbidden. Free verse does not mean that you can't use some metric elements. It just means that you don't have to. But you can as you please.


but as Wooduck says, I think it exists already. Besides rigid serialism there's a lot of highly chromatic music in different genres.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

I'm not sure I understand the question entirely...the so-called chromatic scale isn't like say a major, minor, or modal scale. In western music, if you start on virtually any note of a scale and play an octave, eventually the ear locks in to a tonic key center. It makes the chords we know possible. Playing a chromatic scale starting at any point, you can play successive notes until the cows come home and your ear will never lock into a key center. Composers do write quite chromatically, and it can confuse the ear. The famous music from Tristan und Isolde for example. The music of Franck, Schmidt, Bax, and Korngold for example is so densely chromatic that some people experience a sort of sea sickness.

Free verse - anything goes - and you have chaos - like aleatoric music.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Prokofiev, Schnittke, and Bartok are what you're looking for.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

ZJovicic said:


> Why couldn't exactly the same approach be used for 12 tone scale. (The only difference is that you can't add occasional tone that is outside this scale). Why couldn't people just compose normally in such a scale, trying to express coherent, musical, meaningful ideas?


Perhaps the music you speak of can be performed yet never repeated . In the extreme - not even a recording would make sense . It is like a religious person speaking in tongues , or the babbling of a child - both of which I love as music . Neither is formless . Each is very human and natural . Devising it , writing it down ? no , it is for artists in the moment to create it . Somehow though , even in this freedom your music might be recognized as roots Euro classical .


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## Schoenberg (Oct 15, 2018)

One of the main driving actions in dodecaphonic music is emancipation of all 12 tones, so that they are all equal.
As soon as you use one tone more than other tones, it becomes more important than other tones, and thus can be treated as the tonic, which allows the music to maintain some essence of the former tonal harmony.

To quote myself (lol):

"Even a slight reminiscence of the former tonal harmony would be disturbing, because it would create false expectations of consequences and continuations. The use of a tonic is deceiving if it is not based on _all_ the relationship of tonality."

(Schoenberg: Composition with twelve tones, V. He is specifically talking about octave doubling, but it also applies to what OP is recommending. Also, "all" is italicized by the author, not by myself.)


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Schoenberg said:


> One of the main driving actions in dodecaphonic music is emancipation of all 12 tones...


Like Lincoln freeing the slaves? I have always considered this movement primarily political, not musical, and the results reflect this. How unfair that C is heard more often than F#! We'll fix that. 

In retrospect, there was no silliness that the 20th century couldn't accommodate. Let's hope for better in the 21st.


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## BabyGiraffe (Feb 24, 2017)

Open any modern university level textbook on harmony and you will find different properties and usages of the 12 note tempered scale. Maybe see Howard Hanson's book (search online) - it is free and out of print...

Still, 12 note equal is quite bad as a scale as opposed to a system (same can be said for any n-note equal temperament). The historical 12 note temperaments are more like scales, because they are unequal (we can unequally retune the 12 notes in a variety of ways, including exotic tunings like Turkish/Persian/Arabic and similar that don't sound that equal .)


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Schoenberg said:


> One of the main driving actions in dodecaphonic music is emancipation of all 12 tones, so that they are all equal.
> As soon as you use one tone more than other tones, it becomes more important than other tones, and thus can be treated as the tonic, which allows the music to maintain some essence of the former tonal harmony.
> 
> To quote myself (lol):
> ...


you know I like some Schonberg music, but the idea that "even a slight reminiscence of the former tonal harmony would be disturbing" is based literally on nothing to me. There's not a real justification, he just thinks so but I don't see a scientific basis for this.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern did do this, before adopting the 12-tone system. Schoenberg's _Erwartung_, Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra, and Webern's 5 Movements for String Quartet are all examples of free atonal music based on the chromatic scale.

Personally, I think that was Schoenberg's best period, while Berg and Webern went on to do their best work using 12-tone techniques. Why not just judge by the result?


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

Schoenberg said:


> "Even a slight reminiscence of the former tonal harmony would be disturbing, because it would create false expectations of consequences and continuations. The use of a tonic is deceiving if it is not based on _all_ the relationship of tonality."


When two tonics are active and conversationally related , must one get the last word ? The last laugh ? A super joke might require three . Oh , that this puppet show would deserve such elegance .


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