Scale of the Day (on a weekly basis)

2010 has dawned with a lot of people I know participating in a project to photograph some aspect of every day in the year – a lovely discipline to find things of visual and conversational interest in even the mundane moments life brings, I suspect.  I’ve been really enjoying the photographs posted in various networking media.

But it led me to thinking: how about, instead of a visual image, a scale of the day?

No, not the major and harmonic minor ones we’ve all practiced frantically in the final two weeks before our instrumental examinations.  Last year my most popular post, by some long way, was one I entitled Scales as Propaganda, where I argued that the patterns we learn to play are also the patterns we learn to hear, and the music of our lifetimes is replete with patterns that our [Western] culture,historically, doesn’t believe we should be recognising (otherwise we wouldn’t be able to pass our Grade 8 exams without playing some of them).

I’m proposing that the Scale of the Day  look at the other scales, the modes, the patterns we don’t have names for that are used by composers working today as they create fascinating tonal music people are drawn to listen to.

I put a quick message up on facebook to see who might be interested, and it looks as if we already have a quorum for the 2010 Scale of the Day (on a weekly basis) Experience.

The idea is that each week I will write up a piece about a different, probably unnamed, scale pattern, and then we’ll all go away and play with that pattern and report back as to how we liked it, how it made us feel, how challenging it was to master physically/aurally, all that kind of thing, and see where it leads.

So who’s in?!