Ethnomusicologists and theorists of non-Western music maintain a useful distinction between “scale,” and “mode”: that is, between an abstract collection of tones in a given musical tradition, and the actual conventions of melodic practice in that tradition. Example 1.1, for instance, illustrates the tonal hierarchy and motivic dispositions that transform the undifferentiated pitch material of a Hindustanithat(“scale”) into araga(“mode”), the governing syntax for a piece or improvisation.¹ In short, mode “is more than merely a scale.”² While typical inquiries into unfamiliar musical systems engage mode as a matter of course, recent studies of the Western major...

The famous Turkish ceremony from Lully’sLe Bourgeois Gentilhomme(1670) is a seminal instance of musical exoticism, boasting a modest assortment of conventional exotic signifiers: a solemn march, a minor-mode aria accompanied in parallel octaves, a handful of harmonic and melodic indelicacies, and perhaps most notably, the unrefined monotony of the choral interjection shown in example 2.1. This excerpt further contains a time-honored cliché of “otherness,” but one for which Lully was not himself responsible: the orchestra’s pentatonic countermelody (reduced here for piano), is in fact the work of J. B. Weckerlin, who prepared the 1883 vocal score. This countermelody...

The final movement of Fauré’s Requiem, the “In paradisum,” is an extraordinary piece, befitting its subject. It is both a prayer for redemption and at the same time a mystical glimpse of that redemption, a gracious answer to the prayers of the other six movements. Whereas the preceding “Libera me” ended in utter bleakness—with its stern D minor, its painful diminished-seventh cadence, and its oppressive march-rhythm—the present movement leaves no doubt as to where the soul now rests. (The movement is reproduced in its entirety as P338.)

The movement opens with a curious bass-line ostinato, the pentatonic incipit...

In the last two chapters, I have focused on pentatonicism as signifier, a network of musical and extramusical signs derived from a multitude of historical sources and marshaled by nineteenth-century composers for the purpose of representation. It would be doctrinaire, however, to suppose that compositional decisions were solely the product of ideological forces and programmatic tendencies: musical elements don’t just stand to impress a composer as (conceptually)right, but also as (acoustically)good. And even granting that “sounding good” entails aesthetic (and hence, ideological) assumptions, we must acknowledge a broad class of pentatonicism whose derivation can be said to be...

The nineteenth-century harp pentatonic (leaving aside its more recent incarnations) and its analogue in piano music are exceptional among the diverse repertoire considered thus far for their ostensible non-signification. The explorations in consonance that were pioneered by Parish-Alvars anticipated a late-century aesthetic concern with sheer sonorous beauty, one distinctive aspect of the pentatonic style of the Impressionists. At the same time, programmatic music was also of great concern to these composers, who inherited the traditions of pentatonic signification outlined in part 2 of this book. Moreover, for all their compositional daring, the Impressionists wrote tonal music after all and hence...