Lies my music teacher told me, (don't panic: it's the title of a book!) Options

[BadStrad]

Just adding this to my recent posts list so I can get back to it when I've more time.

[CBDPHILLIPS]

Just bought it from Amazon UK for ?6.11 inc postage! Looking forward to the read (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[xini]

I was taught at uni that not all societies agree on what constitutes consonance or dissonance.
I heard the most amazing recording of two fishermen (from a remote part of Greece) singing the same song a semitone apart - all the way through. The person recording had assumed they were tone deaf, but came to realise it was a deliberate harmony. I can only imagine what that compounder of musical doom Simon Cowell or his fans would say if they were faced with it, but the more you listen the more beautiful it becomes.

[Tenor Viol]

Until relatively recently (well late Renaissance anyway) there was understood to be a distinction between music theory and music practice. There was a theory which in Western society had a view of what constitutes consonance which was derived from ancient Greek philosophy. This basically said that simple mathematical ratios were consonant (I've simplified) so 1:1 is unison; 1:2 is octave; 2:3 is fifth etc.

Practical music making therefore aspired to this theoretical ideal of universal harmony as exemplified by the music of the spheres (the "perfect" sound supposedly made by celestial bodies in their movement).

These ideas ran right upto the Enlightenment. Christopher Simpson, England's greatest viol player of the C17th, wrote a whole section on this subject in his Division Viol in 1665. This is still in print and is also available as a facsimile edition.