It's because, as I said, for the last few centuries,
major scales have been generally regarded as conveying,
and they do, we'll demonstrate this in a minute, but it's not really a matter for
discussion people have accepted this for a very long time.
Major scales are considered to convey a sense of
brightness, excitement,
martial causes, happiness,
joy, whereas minor scales are generally regarded as conveying
quite the opposite valence of emotion and a different sense of arousal.
You remember we just talked about that.
So, minor music is subdued, conveys a darker mood,
a sense of sadness, a sense of despair, again depending on
the context in which it's played, the lyrics of the music, and so on.
But, in general, you can think of a major scale as being excited and
bright and a minor scale as being unexcited and subdued.
And the question of course is well, why should that be?
What is it about major and
minor scales that convey that different emotional sense?
So let's talk about the differences between major and minor scales and
their tonality.
So these are the modes that we talked about, again the ionian and
the aeolian being just referred to as major and minor scales.
These other modes are, as I said in an earlier module,
they're used, with the exception of the Locrian,
they're used in different genres of music and different traditions.
But the major and
minor scales are the preeminent ones and what are the difference?
What make the difference between a major and a minor scale?
So here are the scales drawn on a piano keyboard.
Here are the intervals of the two scales and whether you look at the keyboard or
this listing of the intervals, you can readily see what the differences are.
Just in a nutshell, the differences are that the major scale entails larger
intervals, and the minor scale smaller intervals, smaller tonal intervals.
Again, remember that the interval is with regard to the tonic.
So we're always talking about the two note combination when we're talking about
an interval.
The tonic note and the unison, the same note played
with it an octave the same note played an octave higher.
A major fifth, excuse me.