John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Do any of you know about ancient Tamil music? Wikipedia says it's the predecessor of ...
Do any of you know about ancient Tamil music? Wikipedia says it's the predecessor of Carnatic music, which we find in southern India today, and it flourished from 500 BC to 200 AD.
It says the Tamils started with the pentatonic major scale. Then they developed a scale with seven notes. They then derived new scales by changing where you start the scales and also by "reallocating the pitch and beat of the notes" (huh?).
It says then they developed a 12-tone scale.
Eventually, the four original scales called maruthappann, kurinchippann, sevvaḻi and sadari (huh? what are those?) evolved into 103 different scales called panns.
It also says the most important modes of Tamil music are the Seven Great Modes - which happen to correspond precisely to the seven modes of the major scale in modern western music!
This is starting to sound almost too good to be true. And the talk page for the page on panns raises some questions about the source of this information. So I'm wondering about this stuff.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Tamil_music
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pann
It says the Tamils started with the pentatonic major scale. Then they developed a scale with seven notes. They then derived new scales by changing where you start the scales and also by "reallocating the pitch and beat of the notes" (huh?).
It says then they developed a 12-tone scale.
Eventually, the four original scales called maruthappann, kurinchippann, sevvaḻi and sadari (huh? what are those?) evolved into 103 different scales called panns.
It also says the most important modes of Tamil music are the Seven Great Modes - which happen to correspond precisely to the seven modes of the major scale in modern western music!
This is starting to sound almost too good to be true. And the talk page for the page on panns raises some questions about the source of this information. So I'm wondering about this stuff.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Tamil_music
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pann