For pleasing the listening habit of most of people, you need to arrange your music switch between tense and not tense. It's basic logic of music since the conception of chord system be gradually built in the modern and contemporary history. It represents the harmony relationship between intervals and also meets human's listening nature.Why do you think that?I think it's not that important if we are on the perspective of the entire song.
The chord is the "carrier" of tense and no tense, which describe the "color" of a chord (not emotions), and the chord progression, which build by the chord is the minimum unit to fit that basic logic, even that progression only has two chords, for example:Ⅴ-Ⅰ. (I am not saying we can't write a song with only one chord but in most situation, staying one chord too long time probably makes audience bored if we only think about music theory without other music elements.)
And here's the core, if we want to arrange a chord progression, the scale is a ready-made tool by musicians in the history that can quickly help you find all the note and the chord based on it that have tense relation with previous chord. (assuming we have already chosen one chord as the start.)
And the scale also can tell you which chord has varying degree of tension according to your needs. For example: we set a random note as our start as a tone of a scale, the chord build on it isⅠ, then we can quickly know its dominant note(Ⅴ), and sub-dominant note (Ⅳ) have highest tension that we need. We also have different choices if we dont want that much tense, like Ⅱ, Ⅵ have close function but different color to Ⅳ; Ⅲ, Ⅶ have same use like Ⅴ.
So that's why the scale called "scale", it scales the relation of interval of notes in the scale, it scales the relation of listening tension of ears' nature of human, it decides all the music theory build on it, like Circle of Fifths, and to a certain extent, it affects the emotions of music.
But as I said, it's not that important if we are on the view of entire music. Becase we can have many different chord progressions in a song, we can change the key to other scale, or even just like Jazz music, we can completely detach the music from any single or several scale and just focus the progression on chord itself. Now, the scale is no longer directly affecting the music, just becomes a reference, a tool that can help us to decide which direction we want music goes, a tool that we just need it to quickly know which note and chord can build our developing music logic. (I even didn't mention atonal music and experimental music.)
The conventional Music theory, which represented by scale or tonality, it's just empirical knowledge in the final analysis, unlike physical laws, it can't force any musician to follow it if we really don't want to, and nobody could say you are really wrong. It's just a helpful tool, people know the music that composed on it could be well-sounded, that's all. So my opinion is that the scale doesn't really that matter if we deeply see it, but it has reason to exist. So many different music scale invented by people from different regions, different cultures and different age around the world, it shows how people see this world, what thinking logic people have, and what the way they try to express by music. (so I highly recommend you to watch the video about playing those music that we familiar on different scales, especially traditional scales. you will know how magic that music scale is.)
Like I said, it's just a ready-made tool by musicians in the history,
but we all know only useful things last from the history.
Statistics: Posted by weeii — Thu Nov 07, 2024 10:47 am