seven colors, seven planets, seven notes, septive?

[janus!andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Brian D. McCary writes:

> If Newton did want corrospondance between the notes of the scale and
> the colors, and from Malcolm Saunders' comments, it sounds like he did,
> then it seems to me he was trying to force to a somewhat arbitrary 
> scheme, since there are eight notes in an octive.  Otherwise, of course,
> it would be a septive, right?

I don't think so. Intervals in music always count the start and end
notes. There are actually only seven transitions in an octave and,
assuming you assimilate the fundamental and its octave (which everyone
who is not tone deaf does) there are only seven distinct notes.

> The note we all forget in these evenly
> tempered times would be the flatted seventh, which, in the key of C,
> those retentive Germans occasionally refered to as H, at least through the
> time of Beethoven.   It shows up all the time in pop music, in dominant
> seventh chords just before the resolution to the tonic (some sort of short
> story in that theme...) and corrosponds to the 14th overtone in the 
> harmonic series, where the eighth through the fifteenth overtones make up 
> the notes of the octave.  I can't recall when the harmonic scale was 
> abandoned for the 12 note tempered scale, but for some reason, I thought
> it was after Newton.

Regarding the well tempered scale I think it does go back to the time
of Newton. Remember e.g. Bach's `Well Tempered Clavier' which was
written when harpsichords with the new tuning were still a relatively
fresh invention. I think it was written somewhere around 1680/90.
Also, there were several other averaged out scales introduced before
the well-tempered scale, I recall the names `mean tone' and
`arithmetic'. Newton may well have been aware of these scales.

Bach made use of the H to incorporate the sequence of notes BACH into
some of his works. It occurs briefly in the unfinished last fugue in
his `Art of Fugue' but there is good reason to believe that the
missing final section should include a subject based on this opening
sequence. Interestingly Schoenberg also used the script B which in
text stands for a double s - cannot remember what for but it might be
for Eb which is pronounced ess, the same as the script B. Schoenberg
often uses A E ess and G E ess as the initial (pun intended) notes in
some of his tone rows, these being his and his wife's initials. I
don't suppose Newton would have regarded such notation as kosher. I
mean he thought Leibniz' notation was dotty (or rather...)


Andrew Dinn
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To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.