This post is a continuation of the last one in which we look at supplementing the rather limited whole-tone harmony with one or more added notes. The resulting chords take us away from "pure whole-tone harmony" in the same way that, for example, secondary dominants and other borrowed chords take us away from "pure diatonic harmony" while simultaneously enriching it.| cochranemusic.com
Here's a little thing I found while experimenting with the complement of the quartal triad from this post (more on that to come). It turns out there are a few more ways to combine three diminished triads without any overlaps than I'd expected and, as usual, I found some unpromising globs of semitones with musical possibilities hidden inside them.| cochranemusic.com
Back when I was putting together the scales book (a good 10 years ago now) I had trouble finding names for all the exotic scales I wanted to put in. When I couldn't find one I just had to make something up. Sometimes I think I made a good choice -- Superaugmented and Ultra Locrian, for example, do what they say on the tin -- and sometimes not. But for one set of scales I was completely stumped.| cochranemusic.com
The hexatonic set 6-z38 came up in relation to some material I was developing out of Yagapriya and at that time I put it aside for later. Well, later has arrived. Let's see what we can make of this awkward pile of semitones.| cochranemusic.com
Games and music are two of the very few true universals of human culture -- although they take very different forms and have varying functions, it seems likely that all human societies feature music and games. In English we even use the same word for both activities: "play". While I wouldn't want to push the analogies too far, games have probably influenced my thinking about music more than I'm aware of. Today I realised that games-people have a name for much of what I do on this blog and I w...| cochranemusic.com
I recently revisited this post in search of some new harmonic ideas and thought I'd take a closer look at Yagapriya, a rather exotic scale for us Westerners that's very far removed from the diatonic scales we're used to. It also doesn't harmonize easily using my usual tricks so I wanted to treat it more as a unique thing in itself and see where it led me. (As usual I'm using "Yagapriya" as the name for a 12EDO scale; I won't have anything to say about Carnatic music in this post.)| cochranemusic.com
The Lulu Chord is what I call a chord formed by playing a perfect fifth with a perfect fourth nestled inside it: for example, C-C#-F#-G. The outer notes, C-G are the fifth and the inner ones, C#-F#, are the fourth. This chord is non-diatonic and, as far as I know, unknown in tonal music. But it was very popular with the Second Viennese School and is a good thing to get a handle on if you're looking for some modernist vocabulary.| cochranemusic.com
Just a quick follow-up to my previous post about Yagapriya. We start with the 4-8 chord inside Yagapriya, which isn't quartal, and end up developing a little world of quartal-like harmony from it.| cochranemusic.com
The formless form of divine light that dwells in all the temples of Kartikeya sounds like it would be pretty far out, if it were a musical scale, and indeed it is. Jyoti Swarupini is an unusual Carnatic scale that hasn't come up too often before in these parts so I thought I'd have a look at it. No more mangling of Hinduism, I promise. read more| Cochrane Music - Lessons
Everyone is always saying something along the lines of "limitations breed creativity" but you rarely get much practical detail about that. Assuming it's advice, it seems to be suggesting that we choose to be limited. But what sort of limitations might be useful and what might they be useful for? I don't have answers but I do have some thoughts and reflections... read more| Cochrane Music - Lessons
I've been thinking about the term "outsider artist" lately. When it was coined, the artworld (and in particular, for our purposes, the music world) was unrecognizably different from how it is today. I'm beginning to think that a lot of us could consider ourselves outsider artists and maybe that would be a fruitful response to our present predicament. A rambling monologue follows, but I promise some nice pictures to go with it. "Henry Darger Butterflies" by Brooklyn Taxidermy read more| Cochrane Music - Lessons
Last time we looked at what we can make from the minor pentatonic scale plus two of the notes b2, 3, b5 and 7. This time we look at the remaining possible notes 2, b6 and 6. The previous batch of scales were rather well-behaved but these are a bit more of a mixture. We'll look through them all, recap everything and see if we can find a higher-level perspective on it all. read more| Cochrane Music - Lessons
Some Sub-Saharan African communities celebrate annual festivals that are preceded by a mandated period of silence (or quiet, at any rate) in which music-making is banned (source, source). I don't know much about these musical cultures but the general idea has been weirdly impactful for me. read more| Cochrane Music - Lessons
The "blues scale" is a common name for the hexatonic you get from adding a b5 to the minor pentatonic (1-b3-4-b5-5-b7). The idea is to play minor pentatonic with a "spicy note". Other spicy notes are the major 3 and (less often employed) the major 7 and b9. As a bit of fun, let's see what happens when we add two of these to minor pentatonic to produce a seven-note scale that, in theory, ought to have one foot in blues / rock language that everyone who has heard twentieth century pop music wil...| Cochrane Music - Lessons
I had a thought today that ended up in a bit of a rabbit hole. This is one of those posts that's probably just pseudo-academic hocus-pocus but there are lots of weird chords and scales in it and maybe there's even something to the "theory" stuff too.| cochranemusic.com
Here's a great excerpt from a Barry Harris workshop where he introduces an interesting diminished concept, which he (jokingly) calls his "personal scale". It produces a very cool jazz sound by a quite unexpected means. The video is a bit piano-focussed so I thought it might help some guitar players to have a summary from our point of view of the main idea.| cochranemusic.com
