Universal Language: A Super Brief History of the Pentatonic Scale

I’m sure everyone has heard the idiom ‘music is the universal language’ right? That’s definitely true for a lot of reasons but there is one reason why it is literally true and it has to do with our good friend, the pentatonic scale. Hold your moans and groans blues haters, there is a really good reason for this that some of you may not know.

The very first musical scale of repeating notes in pleasant intervals in every ancient music making culture was…drum roll please…The Pentatonic Scale. That’s right, from Asia to the Mediterranean, from Africa to the British Isles, the one thing we all have in common is that little five note scale we all know and love so well. Why is that?

Before mankind came up with modes, the circle of fifths and confusing, complicated chord names like ’ Fsus2 b5/B’, (say that five times fast) we just knew what sounded good to us so to find these notes we used our own very finely tuned instrument: The Human Ear.

Most likely after inventing the camp fire humanity noticed that a plucked string with the proper amount of tension makes a very pleasant sound. After that we discovered that if we pluck a string at half its length, we get the same note, one octave above. This is the first natural interval that sounds pleasant. Now we have two different strings to play with, one octave apart. Now the fact that this is a naturally occurring phenomenon allows for us all to discover this on our own and come up with the same scale.

So now we have our octave but we want a variety of notes to play with so the next step is to find the notes in between the octaves that sound good together. Because we discovered music before mathematics and equations, all we could do is find the next note that naturally sounded the best in relation to that first note.

There are of course several ways to discover these notes. The Egyptians created harps with a series of strings of different lengths; some ancient Chinese instruments only had a bowl and one string. Either way, they can achieve a similar goal.

 You may have noticed a phenomenon called harmonics. This is when you lightly touch a string and it produces a clear note. There are only so many places on a string that will produce a harmonic: half way, on the quarter, and on a third of the length of the string however only by plucking the string at the third of its length (7th fret on the guitar) do we get a new note.

Ah Ha! Ok, were on a roll right? We can apply this make a new string that is shorter by a third. This is the 4^th string on a 6 string harp, 6^th being one octave from the first. Take the harmonic on the third of that string and voila, we get the 2^nd string. Repeat this on the 2^nd, and we get our 5^th string, then our 3^rd and we have our scale and a harp tuned naturally to itself. Now add frets at those same intervals along a one stringed instrument with a neck and we can create melodies over the harp chords.

After our collective ears naturally picked out the whole tones and landed on five whole notes that sounded great together and stopped there for a while. And what is fascinating is that because this is a naturally occurring phenomenon  all cultures developed this scale independently from the each other and we all created harps and lutes of various kinds, all different yet quite similar is function and design. Add these to the drums and percussion instruments that came before, we have ancient bands playing music that could be easily adapted to other cultures. To me, this is absolutely amazing and equally beautiful.

So here we are, five thousand years ago and we have an ancient Egyptian, a Persian, a Celt and a Chinese musician all playing the same relative  five note scale in completely different cultures in a different context. Try it out. Find any old folk song form Japan or Syria on YouTube and try playing the relative pentatonic scale on your instrument. Chances are you will find a passable melody. Pretty cool eh?

Now today, we enjoy clashing notes, 7 note scales, semitones, diminished and minor scales, but originally, we were not inclined to find much enjoyment out of semitones, which tend to clash together when played simultaneously so naturally we landed on these pleasant sounding notes and we all thought it was hunky dory.

 Eventually, as all musicians do, we got bored of using the same scale all the time so over the millennia we added semitones, diminished scales and so forth to add complexity and variety to our music but it all started form our good old friend, the pentatonic scale.

How Music Works by John Powel

The Creation of Musical Scales http://vaczy.dk/htm/scales2.htm

Ancient Greek Origins of the Western Music Scale 2.9 http://www.midicode.com/tunings/greek.shtml