FW: seven colors, seven planets, seven notes, septive?

[Tim Ware]

The mode with the flatted seventh degree is called the "mixolydian" mode,
as in Fergus Mixolydian, he of the consciousness balloon.



On Wed, 8 May 1996, JM wrote:

> Brian McCary Writes....
> ---------------Original Message---------------
> 
> 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?  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.
> 
> Which just goes to show that scientists are just as prone to ritualization
> and fetishism as anyone else.  I believe it was Kepler who "proved" that 
> there where only five planents, because there were only 5 perfect 
> solids, which fit the known planitary orbits....
> 
> Brian McCary
> 
> 
> I'm a little rusty on music theory, but I go along with the 7 note scale based on 
> the old Greek modes.   Each of the seven modes began on a different note of 
> the scale, though the two half-step intervals stayed always in the same place.  
> (Try this using only the white keys of a piano.  Only the scale beginning on "C" 
> will sound right.)  "We" selected one of the 7 modes to be our major scale.  
> The 8th note, of course, was a repeat of the 1st, just like each Sunday begins 
> another seven-day week.  (If a seven day week is not an arbitrary unit of time I 
> don't know what is!)  I thought the German "H" referred to an enharmonic 
> note, not to a diminished seventh.   So I can see the kute korrespondence 
> that Newton was seeking.  As for the conversion from the old mean-tone scale 
> (in which each of the 12 intervals was equal) to the equal-temperament scale 
> that we now use, didn't J.S. Bach (who died in 1750) have a large role in that? 
>                 -jm
> 
>