
Credit to @aileensophiee who did the incredible video on this that came up on my feed (she is far better than I am - fun fact is I’ve never studied solfège which is probably why I bodged it up). When you see singers calling this the Major scale, the Arabic scale, and the Chinese scale, that's not really the full story even though to your ear the middle key sounds similar to Arabic music and the same for Chinese. But there isn't a single Arabic scale. Across the Arab world, music is traditionally organised into maqāmāt (singular: maqām), which is a rich family of melodic systems, each with its own characteristic intervals and rules. There are dozens of commonly used maqāmāt, and they don't all sound alike. Some include intervals that don't exist in the Western twelve-note equal-tempered system, including neutral intervals often approximated as quarter tones. The one in this video is most similar to Maqām Hijaz although that’s not totally the “Double Harmonic Major scale” that I think this is. I’d love an Arab musicologist to fill us in in the comments. The same applies to the so-called "Chinese scale". What many people are actually recognising is the sound of a pentatonic (five-note) scale, which has been prominent in many Chinese musical traditions for centuries. Scale degrees are called gong, shang, jue, zhi and yu - it would never traditionally use do re mi as seen here. Solfège - which is the whole #doremi thing - is a system developed primarily in Italy and France to teach singers how to recognise and reproduce musical pitches.
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