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How did Western music “settle” on a 12-tone scale?

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Historically it developed gradually, started with a seven tone system which developed from the historical Greek modes. This was constructed using pure fifths to make a chain of seven notes. The five and seven note systems based on pure fifths ar... read more

Firstly, the 19th century Romantic composers were writing more and more chromatically: they modulated (or started on) distant keys like F# major, and increasingly used enharmonic modulations. read more

As such, twelve-tone music is usually atonal, and treats each of the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale with equal importance, as opposed to earlier classical music which had treated some notes as more important than others (particularly the tonic and the dominant note). read more

As in the Western diatonic scale, the Indian scale was based on 7 main notes: SA, RE, GA, MA, PA, DHA and NI. If we go back to the most ancient texts on music, the scales were divided into two tetrachords, similar to the ancient Greeks, and later put together with a whole tone (9/8) between, Ma – Pa, so a full octave was completed. read more

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