why university Music Departments are so dreadful : they base their theories on Nature but their scales on Humanity

             True Harmony is NOT to be found in what your music teacher teaches you

Not even Trump defends Modernity as fervently as any liberal arts university’s Music Department does, despite being filled with mostly left-leaning academic musicians.

A Paradox to be sure.

The Western European genre known as “The Common Practise Period”  or “Modernity in Music” lasted only for 150 years.

 It lasted roughly 1750-1900, and even then only in European art music - what the rest of us wrongly call ‘classical’ music. A merely blip in the long history of humanity’s music making around the world.

But, in the minds of the world’s university music departments and their hundreds of millions of living graduates and sycophants, it dominates all of the world’s music, past, present and future : all the world’s music is constantly measures as how well it conforms or deviates to this genre.

For the rest of us, we measure music by how much we like it : the world’s music charts and lists of all-time standards serve us plenty well.

Why should we care that our favourite song failed the CPP exam massively ?

Indeed why should we care that virtually all of the music produced during the CPP would also fail - in some way - the CPP test ?

The problem began with the fact that while the theories of the CPP were based on the harmonic series, a fact of Nature - their scales and hence practises were actually based upon the learned illusions of Humanity.

CPP music is based around the equal temperament system of creating musical scales wherein all the notes are now slightly flatter or sharper than Nature, but overall listenable, particularly when you are fed nothing else.

This allows a simple fretted or keyboarded instrument to move from key to key without re-tuning.

This is good because under CPP and equal tuning, all the various intervals sound boring alike in all the keys, by design. (If not for the new ability to shift keys freely, and hence absolute pitch levels too, we’d all go mad from boredom.)

All the modes and scales of the world - all sounding different and as a result producing wonderfully different melodies - were swept aside by the CPP adopting only one scale/mode, the Ionian, and renaming it the MAJOR scale : in their theory, the only truly scientific scale.

Under Modernity, everything the elites wanted to ram down our throats had to be shown to be based solely on Nature and Science.

The CPP’s Major-only system was said to be scientific because it was based on the small whole number ratios that only the major scale’s third and fifth notes supposedly shared with the scale’s key or tonic note.

Which they do : but only in the old fashioned (and just discarded)  just tuning scales that were actually based on Nature’s harmonic series, not just ‘claimed to be’ !

In the equal tuning set-up of the CPP, the 5th and 3rd had no more a a natural affinity to the tonic note than did any of the other notes : all were dissonant and out of sorts (albeit in a pleasing way I might add).

Only the unison and the octaves are fully consonant with the root tonic, AND in both just and equal tuning systems !

Which is why incidentally, in my music, the main tune and its counter-melody are only ‘doubled’ with these fully consonant intervals : hence being fully 100% harmonic.

Most others would double them with all manner of intervals and it would sound very nice indeed : but nice because they are also ever so slightly dissonant. Nice stuff, but not harmonic : not according to Nature & Science.....