Unless you like misspellings, misreadings, and downright wrong-ness, please, don't ever read this book. Some highlights from that advertisement/summary:
...the best way to end up a melody is the chaining dominant seventh chord and tonic perfect chord....
...the book explains the building of the musical scale by means of the Circle of Fifths (sketch on cover). This concept has been the platform of all musics throughout the world for 5 millenna. Designed in Mesopotamia, it spread into the antique Persia, then towards the indian sub-continent. Phytagoras brought it in the 6th century B.C. in Greece whose tetrachord scale had only 4 degrees (the 4 strings of their lyra often seen on ancient paintings)....
...The first turning point in Western Europe occured around 1000 A.D. It was the beginning of Polyphony; De Arezzo achieved the definitive form of music writing, and by the same occasion ruled out the quarter-tone of the greec heritage....
...The big Turning Point occured at the Renaissance, due to some theorists who tried to impose scales containing only consonant intervals, very difficult to put into practice. This confusion caused the death of the ancient 7 medieval modes and set the major-minor dichotomy in Western Europe. Only one has been remained in the 16th century : the major (ionian)....
...The Russian and the Orthodox Church have kept on using the ancient medieval modes. The Coptic Church of Egypt, in addition to major and minor, has a great variety of modes (non-western, ancient, often with quarter-tones, etc). So, the western music is all but universal, and has strong cultural features....
...in order to comply with Just Intonation, some scientists (C. Huygens and J. Sauveur) tried to provide the scale with consonant intervals (such as the harmonic seventh, slightly lower than the minor seventh)...
2 comments:
Wow... I almost want to read this book just to see if it really is this terrible. Arezzo outlawing quarter-tones? Western music is universal? Maybe the reviewer was just theory-illiterate in addition to being bad with English, and the book is actually OK? . . .
Let's hope.
Even without the misspellings and poor grammar I'm lost... Thank goodness for people like you, Tim, who can appreciate theoreticals of musics for me. ;)
By the way, the other day I found myself trying to describe the essence of a particular word to my co-workers in hopes to find the Spanish equivalent. Seems like the adjectives in ImagineIff are not universal either. The closest I got was the word "cursi," a mix of "pretentious" and "kitsch."
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