Perfect Harmony: Can You Feel and Hear the Difference?

There are many ways to create magic with music. Using perfect harmony is one of them.

Western music schools usually state that Arabic music does not make use of harmony. What they mean is that two instruments don’t typically play the same melody line with some harmonic interval chosen to separate them.

What they don’t even see is that two instruments make interweaving melodic patterns built on a scale which, if it comes from the ancient “maqam”  system of modes, maintains the perfect harmonic intervals which are mathematically perfect and which are often called “just intonation.”

The Western music school only make passing mention of the fact that the equally tempered scales used in modern Western music are all slightly out-of-tune so that perfect harmony is no longer even possible with Western instruments like the keyboard and the fretted guitar.

Many musicians are finding their way into microtonal music so that perfectly mathematically harmonious intervals can be played. And many of these musicians are discovering that certain ancient musical traditions preserved in Egypt, China, Persia, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, India and Indonesia are still performed in perfect harmony.

But many musicians are fans of equal temperament and feel that today’s fast-moving melody lines with convoluted key change modulations can only be performed in equal temperament.

Everybody is right from their own point of view, of course.

Here in this blog we can exchange information and views about these things!