We're taught "this is a scale" from early elementary school music classes, while the teacher plays the major scale. Stuff like this blows my mind, and I wish I could find more music like this, rather than incessant tambourine music that I thought was all of that era:įrom my perspective as a music educator, the reasons for including harmonic and melodic minors in auditions (and as lesson assignments even for those who aren't auditioning for anything) are twofold:ġ) a person is more likely to run into them in solo and orchestra music often so being prepared for the correct sound in the musician's ear is important, as well as being in the musician's fingering so it's not a strange-feeling passage Ģ) major scales are so strong that a student can fake their way through them. It's actually kinda fun listening to some late renaissance or early baroque music and hearing some wild harmonic or polyphonic ideas that you won't really hear for a while after, or are kinda sui generis. This website gives a few examples that I think illustrate the point pretty well With jazz theory, I would think other kinds of scales would be foundational. So essentially, the people writing the test must be assuming the primacy of the classical period in tonal music, and probably assume that with this basis, any skilled musician can make pretty good sense of other modes or synthetic scales. I think you can end up seeing it a lot more as a formula in cadences, which, again, would have arisen from the common practices that happened to get popular and would later come to be seen as tropes of certain styles and time periods. The harmonic minor, as Cotton points out, gives you the dominant 7 chord. I will preface this with hardly knowing the first thing about music theory, but I think the reason the melodic shows up is that it became a trope in the classical (and somewhat before) era enough, so that when theorists decided to write down the music theory of how music tended to be written by the most popular composers, they realized that the practice that had arisen was regular use of the melodic minor in the music at the time. Just that the two unusual minors always seemed arbitrary to an extent.Ĭhristian Lesniak Edited: July 13, 2020, 12:59 AM I'm not saying we shouldn't do them - in fact I found when I did my jazz post-grad that it was essential to learn a whole bunch of other scales. What are people in other countries doing? Any theories why the big emphasis on the H and M minors? Is this some throwback that has less relevance these days? I now live in the USA where it seems natural minor is practiced more by default (please put me right if I am wrong). Certainly the melodic minor is very much like Arabic and Asian scales that play differently on the ascent than they do on the descent. Other than Eric Satie I cannot think of any Classical repertoire with the minor third gap in the scale - seems more East European gypsy, klezmer or further Eastern. I get that if you learn a major scale you will basically have the other modes (sort of) but I am just curious why the emphasis on melodic and harmonic? I don't remember coming across it too much in the classical repertoire. phrygian or locrian minors, not to mention other exotic scales. They cite a quote from Groves, saying that there are (only) 3 permutations of minor: natural, harmonic and melodic. There is something on the site about natural minor scales being introduced in 2012 as an optional alternative at grades 1 and 2. It always seemed like a curious thing to me, so I just looked at the ABRSM requirements these days and it seems that nothing much has changed - candidates still required to play harmonic and melodic minors. Harmonic and Melodic minor scales, interesting as they were, did not seem to feature as much in day to day music in any genre as much as natural/aeolian minor and dorian minor. I remember the scales were major, chromatic, but the minors were melodic minor and harmonic minor. Way back in the day I did my 8 grades with the Associated Board back in the U.K. Christopher Payne Why harmonic and melodic minors? July 12, 2020, 8:42 PM