We don’t know of a civilization that had no musical culture.
Some scholars assert that music predated languages.
Music is innately human. And these big concepts are mostly what I talk about in my YouTube series, Poco Piano. I talk about fundamental concepts about music and demonstrate a bit at the piano. However, to explain certain big concept, I do have to establish some technical foundations as well. A few of my episodes are dedicated to these technical topics. I was surprised when it came to my attention that my most watched video is on of these technical ones: on “Diatonicism and Chromaticism.”
…There must be a need!! “I finally understand!” “My homework led me to your video.” The appreciation in the comments make me happy.
So, today, I am blogging on that very topic.
Let’s start from the concept of octave. Octave is a distance between two notes, like C to C, D to D, E to E. “Oct” in the term octave is 8: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C = 8 notes!
Diatonic music is when you use only the members of the scale. So, if you were to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the key of C (which has no black keys), you can play the whole piece just on the white keys.
The Western 7-note scale, not all the distance between the two notes of the scale are equal. For example, C to D is a whole step, and E to F is a half step. In Western music, an octave is divided into 12 equal parts.
C-C#-D-D#-E-F-F#-G-G#-A-A#-B-C
The smallest distance between two notes, for example C to C#, is called half step. A whole step is a combination of two half steps, like C to D, with C# in between. The Western scales consist of 5 whole steps and 2 half steps.
Chromaticism is when you introduce a note that is outside of the 7-note scale. The stem of the word Chromaticism comes from Greek and Latin, meaning “color.” To introduce chromaticism to a diatonic music means that you are adding colors to a clean slate.
For example, if you add chromaticism to the Twinkle in C Major, it goes like this.
Here is the entire video from my YouTube series, Poco Piano.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYmFP2HqSC0[/embedyt]
…Would you like more blog entries like this one? If so, please do consider leaving a comment and sharing this blog. I also welcome comments about what you want me to discuss.
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