source file: mills3.txt
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 15:25:54 +0100

Subject: Re: blues

From: wauchope@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil

> Hstick wrote:
> after all these years of playing it, I don't think I really
> know the exact origin of the blues scale. Is it African (very likely)? As
> I said, it is very Middle Eastern in many ways...does anyone out there
> know for sure?

I don't know for sure either, but back when I took ethnomusicology
there was one particularly haunting African (Bambara) flute song that
used a pentatonic scale containing a neutral third, augmented fourth
and neutral seventh that sounded distinctly "bluesy" to me.  When I
later tried to recreate the tuning from memory, this came close to
capturing the remembered effect:

	1/1  11/9  11/8  3/2  11/6  2/1

To get this sound out of a Western instrument, an early African
American would have had to approximate the elevenal ratios by bending
adjacent notes of the Western scale: major-minor third for the 11/9,
fourth-tritone for the 11/8 and major-minor seventh for the 11/6
(blues pianists get the same effect by hitting both notes at once).
These are the three "blue note" areas whose pitch fluctuates and bends
in blues performance, and so could result from the effort to reconcile
an African and Western tuning.

The neutral thirds would also explain the resemblance to Middle
Eastern music.  P.S. As Kathleen Schlesinger notes in _The Greek
Aulos_, primitive flutes drilled simply with equally-spaced finger
holes tend to produce undertonal scales, and it's been my experience
that such flutes often contain a neutral third -- possibly from the
undertonal sequence

	11/10  11/9  11/8  11/7  11/6  11/5

which might be closer to what that Bambara flute was actually up to.

Anyway, this is just one speculation -- there are many theories about
the origin of the blues scale and we'll probably never know for sure.

-- Ken Wauchope


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