Universal Music?

I have read a lot recently about the pentatonic scale, that is, the scale of notes that are fifths from each other. A fifth, I have learned, means that the two notes are 4 spaces apart on the staff.    

For example, from C to G would be a fifth. (Please fix anything here that is wrong, Mary or Nate, in the comments). If you start at C and keep going up by fifths, you would get C - G - D - A - E. If you keep going, you get the famous circle of fifths, which is used for making chords and transcribing music to different keys. The five notes listed above form the pentatonic scale. There is some scientific discussion about this scale being a sort of universal scale that is hard-wired into our brain. 

Wikipedia lists the following users of pentatonic scales:       

Pentatonic scales are very common and are found all over the world, including Celtic folk music, Hungarian folk music, West African music, African-American spirituals, Gospel music, American folk music, Jazz, American blues music, rock music, Sami joik singing, children's song, the music of ancient Greece and the Greek traditional music and songs from Epirus, Northwest Greece, music of Southern Albania, folk songs of peoples of the Middle Volga area (such as the Mari, the Chuvash and Tatars), the tuning of the Ethiopian krar and the Indonesian gamelan, Philippine Kulintang, Native American music, melodies of Korea, Malaysia, Japan, China and Vietnam (including the folk music of these countries), the Andean music, the Afro-Caribbean tradition, Polish highlanders from the Tatra Mountains, and Western Impressionistic composers such as French composer Claude Debussy.  

The emphasis seems to be on folk music from many different regions of the world. I think of folk music as being people big into music, but not necessarily into music theory as taught in schools. In much of what I am reading, the emphasis seems to be that the pentatonic scale just sounds right, beginning with children.    

The website Classics for Kids shows how this appears in children's music education:   

The music used in the classroom is based on the children's own heritage with a combination of folk and composed music. Here in America, our classrooms are multicultural. Orff philosophy embraces the folk music of all cultures. They are almost all in the universal pentatonic scale. (Five note scale - separated by whole steps.) C Pentatonic would include the pitches C D E G A.

I know Mary has been extensively trained in the Orff School of Music Education, so I am interested to hear what she thinks.    


At the World Science Festival in June of 2009, scientists and musicians came together to discuss "Notes and Neurons: In Search of a Common Chord". From the festival's website:   

We don’t know much about the human brain on music. Do people instinctively know the sound patterns of the pentatonic scale? Is there a base level of musical knowledge in all of us, just waiting to be tapped? Or is the pentatonic scale simply so common in Western music that it has become ingrained in all of our minds? Improvisational genius Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation to demonstrate the power of the pentatonic scale—or at least the audience’s familiarity with it.

Here is the Bobby McFerrin video:   

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.


Notice his comment: "It doesn't matter where in the world I am; when I do this exercise, the audience always gets it." 

More on this later as we look at Leonard Bernstein's six lectures at Harvard University on "The Unanswered Question".