So do you still get a creepy feeling when you hear Tubular Bells?

[Ralphie ★]

I sort of do. The full song is aboot 25 minutes long, BTW. 

[Chris...]

No. I had the Album before it was in the movie. Mike Oldfield played all of the instruments 

[Allen ★]

That’s the album with a triangular pipe on the cover, right?

[Ralphie ★]

14 minutes ago, Allen said:

That’s the album with a triangular pipe on the cover, right?

Yup!  He was only around 20 when he made it.

[Thaddeus Kosciuszko]

2 hours ago, Philander Seabury said:

The full song is aboot 25 minutes long, BTW. 

 

It's now also a full-feature video called...

 

 

YouTubular Bells.

[MickinMD ★]

I like it.

When you take piano lessons in the Adult Program of the world-class Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, you also have to take courses in composition, music theory, and music history.  Here's something I learned that helps me appreciate tunes like Tubular Bells.

Tubular Bells is written in Dorian Mode, one of the 8 Medieval "Church Modes" that were used instead of mostly the Major and Minor scales of today. The Ionic and Aeolian are the two main music scales used today and we call them the Major and Minor scales, respectively.  There's a table of the Church Modes at the bottom of this message.

If you look at the keys on a piano, you see that there is no black key between B and C and between E and F.  So we take a smaller musical step to go from E to F and B to C than we do with the other notes in the major scale as shown on this keyboard.  Here is our do-re-mi of today, beginning with the key of C on a piano:

Because of the way harmonics works and how the wavelengths of the notes are related to each other, it's written in stone that there must be two places where black keys are missing, but it's NOT written in stone exactly between which notes they have to be.  If we create musical scales by putting the black keys in different places, it strongly changes the feel of the music from happy to sad to mysterious to solemn, etc.

A lot of haunting music is written in the Church mode known as Dorian.  Tubular Bells is done in A Dorian (close to A Minor) and Scarborough Fair is in E Dorian.

"Are you going to Scarborough Fair?" etc. sounds so different than most modern music!

The Beatles song "Eleanor Rigby" slips into Dorian mode in the line "picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been" and makes that line stand out in the song.

Dorian is most closely tied to modern scales when in the key of D and many the songs written from the Baroque Era (1600-1685) to our era are written in D Major (D Ionic) to sound more pompous and official.  Pachelbel's Canon in D Major is an example.

Here are the whole and half steps between the notes in each church mode, where Ionic is today's "Major" scale and Aeolian is today's "Minor" scale.  They're listed in their most common keys but each can be used in almost any key.

[donkpow]

 

[Ralphie ★]

Ok, the rest of you pikers please take note of dr mickin’s response as an example of what a proper response should be.  

[MickinMD ★]

49 minutes ago, Philander Seabury said:

Ok, the rest of you pikers please take note of dr mickin’s response as an example of what a proper response should be.  

I might add that our scales of today are built on a lie!  But it's the only way they work!

The Ancient Greeks could see the wavelengths of the notes by the way strings vibrated when plucked - you can see the string setting up more and more sine waves along itself as you tighten the string to make the pitch go higher.  I used to love demonstrating this to physics classes!

As a result the Greeks discovered and developed the relationship between notes and octaves long before modern technology existed.

But there was a practical problem.  Because of those vibrational requirements C sharp and D flat were at slightly different pitches and so were all other pairs of sharps and flats.  That was way too many different notes to handle within an octave on a musical instrument or even with voice.

Not only that, but the variable amount of pitch differences between the notes meant that a melody sounded different if it was played in a different key, say G instead of C.

So, by the 1600's, musicians began experimenting with the "Well Tempered Scale," which divided the 12 notes and half notes in each octave so there was an equal change in the ratio of wavelengths between each note.  That means a melody played in any key will sound basically the same, just at a lower or higher pitch.

Of course, the old musicians resisted the change, saying it was impure music and an insult to God, etc.

But then, in 1722, a book of music was published (cover of the autograph [original] manuscript below) that changed the world of music to this day!  The recognized-as-great in his own time composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach wrote and published "The Well Tempered Clavier,"  a book of piano/clavier/harpsichord music of 24 different Preludes and 24 different Fugues, all beautiful pieces and one of each written all of the 24 modern Major and Minor keys, proving to the world that the Well Tempered system of tuning works!  It's the ONLY system used in mainstream music now!

This is one of the reasons why Bach is often called "The Father of Music."  Whether it's rock and roll, jazz, classical, flamenco, etc., they all follow Bach's lead and use the Well Tempered tuning and also mostly follow Bach's rules for how the four voices (musical or human: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass) interact with each other.

[Ralphie ★]

Now you are just showing off.

Good stuff!  It is fun to see strings vibrate.  

[donkpow]

2 hours ago, Philander Seabury said: