In particular if one voice already has one of these raised tones, it would be problematic to un-raise them in another voice. For example, the fugue that RRR brought up has this passage:. Using a g-natural there would cause a pretty bad clash between the voices:. Because it gives a smoother melodic line when running up and down the scale.
Is this maybe arising from the common misconception that there's "a scale for a chord" and you're meant to stick to it? Not so, and you've just discovered one example! As already mentioned, a strong leading tone, one semitone lower than the root note, sounds better with a smaller change.
This then made a tone and a half gap between notes 6 and 7, so 6 was also put up a semitone from where it was in the natural minor. The natural minor contains all of the notes found in the relative major. Hence the same key sig.
When, in early music, the melody went down, it sounded fine to use the notes from the natural minor, but ascending melodies were thought to be better sounding using the sharpened notes. As an aside, all three minors use the same first 5 notes in their scales: natural then continues with notes from the relative major; harmonic continues with natural minor notes, except the raised leading tone; melodic continues with the parallel major notes ascending.
There is also the jazz melodic, which favours the old ascending melodic notes both ways. Another way to look at things popular in the Common Practice Period is to consider that each key has two modes, major, and minor. Both the "natural" versions Ab, Bb and the "raised" versions A, B are for the most part considered diatonic to the key.
Historically, the major mode seems to have come from the Lydian and Mixolydian modes. The minor mode comes from the Dorian and Phrygian modes. Fashions in cadential and melodic procedures lead the major and minor modes. The two most obvious are the raised seventh degree at a cadence and the avoidance of an augmented second between the usual sixth and raised seventh scale degrees, especially in vocal music. The use of raised steps in ascending and lowed steps in descending passages is a reasonable rule, but it really only holds when the passage has tonic-oriented underlying harmony like c-minor chords in the key of c-minor.
With subtonic-oriented harmony, the tendency is to used both scale steps in their lowered form Ab and Bb against an F minor chord. Similarly, the raised scales steps tend to be preferred against dominant harmony A and B vs a G or G7 chord.
There are several other exceptional procedures; the most common is to ignore any of the above procedures for color reasons. It sounds a bit more exotic to use the augmented second. This is no problem for instrumental music. Also, the Ab-B scale step is often used against a dominant harmony with a dominant ninth chord G9 in the key of C. Arpeggiating a dominant ninth chord uses F,G,Ab,B, four succsive scale steps. The raised 6 step is rarely if ever used as an upper neighbor the fifth step Ab is the neighbor to G.
I'm not sure about lower neighbors to the seventh step, even in a major key. The main purpose of the raised sixth scale degree was because, for the longest time in melody writing, writers wanted to avoid the augmented second interval between the sixth and seventh scale degrees. So the theorist was left with a dilemma, you want a strong raised leading tone so that the Dominant to Tonic resolution in the cadences but still this augmented second led to unsatisfactory melodies.
So they came up with the idea of raising the sixth note of the minor scale as well to solve these problems they were having. The melodic minor has its roots very much in melody writing. When your line is descending then you can have a minor seventh and then also you would not want a raised sixth when your scale is descending, so that is how we came up with the natural minor form ie a minor scale that has all the notes of the relative Major.
Nettles and R. As you can see from the third bar of this wonderful example by Matt L. It's usualy the Aeolian i. A Aeolian is the same as the key of C Major. The key of C major is not the same as the key of A Melodic Minor. Thats a key change. You aren't in A Melodic Minor at that point. End of story. Bach shows us.
And if you're not intending to improvise, how can practicing two completely different sounds and somehow "pretending" that they have anything to do with each other help a child, let alone an adult? Where on earth did this misleading musical pedagogy come from? I'm not being rhetorical here, I'd really like to know. I've asked dozens of top musicians and they all shrug and admit that it's daft, but oy vey!
It's not a question. The question is moot. It's two different things, and music teachers be crazy!! The traditional scale of the major key is the natural major scale, while that of the minor key is the natural minor scale.
The natural minor scale has two chromatic variants — the harmonic minor and the melodic minor scales. Simply put, the melodic minor scale is a chromatic variant of the natural minor scale. The term chromatic is used to describe an idea be it a note, scale, interval, chord, or chord progression that is foreign to a given key.
The A natural minor scale: …is the traditional scale of the key of A minor, hence, it outlines all the notes in the key of A minor. The A melodic minor scale: …contains a modification of the sixth and seventh tones from F and G: …to F and G : …which are foreign to the key of A minor. In a nutshell, the melodic minor scale is a natural minor scale modified with chromatic or foreign notes. The melodic minor scale was derived from the harmonic minor scale another chromatic variant of the natural minor scale which is formed by raising the seventh degree of the natural minor scale by a half step.
Raising the seventh tone of the A natural minor scale: …which is G: …by a half step to G : …produces the A harmonic minor scale: The A harmonic minor scale: …is a gapped scale that has a dissonant melodic interval between its sixth and seventh tones F and G :. The interval from the sixth degree of the A harmonic minor scale which is F : …to its seventh degree which is G : …is an augmented second interval.
The augmented second interval between the sixth and seventh tones of the harmonic minor scale sounded harsh, and constituted a melodic problem.
In a bid to solve the melodic problem of the harmonic minor scale, the sixth degree of the harmonic minor scale which is F : …was raised by a half step to F : …to form another chromatic variant of the natural minor scale : …named after the melodic problem it solved, hence, the name melodic minor scale.
The melodic minor scale can be considered as a natural minor scale with its sixth and seventh degrees raised by a half step. Tetrachord comes from two Greek words — tetra and chord. Tetra means four while chord means notes. Violin players are familiar with the tetrachord because they play all the notes of the major scale using only two strings — four notes per string.
The natural minor scale is related to a major scale because it shares the same key signature as a major scale. Looking at our newly created F natural minor scale, we can see that we have 4 flats in the scale, and so the key signature would read Bb, Eb, Ab, and Db. This is the same key signature as the key of Ab major. For this reason we can say that F natural minor is the relative minor of Ab major.
And remember that when in a major key, the relative minor scale can be constructed simply by using the same pitches but treating the 6th scale degree as the starting note. Harmonic Minor The harmonic minor scale differs from the natural minor scale in only one way — the 7th scale degree is raised by half-step. In other words, in a natural minor scale the 7th scale degree is a minor 7th, whereas in a harmonic minor scale the 7th scale degree is a major 7th and will be a half-step away from the root of the scale.
When the 7th degree of any scale is a half-step away from the root it is called a leading tone , and so the important difference between the natural and harmonic minor scale is that one has a leading tone while the other does not.
Melodic Minor The melodic minor is a bit… weird. In the traditional sense, melodic minor has an ascending form and a descending form, meaning that the notes in the scale changed based on whether you are playing up the scale or down the scale. In practical music performance circles especially in the jazz world the melodic minor scale is the same whether ascending or descending.
First the traditional approach: When playing the ascending form of the melodic minor scale, only the 3rd scale degree is lowered by half-step.
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