The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #144039   Message #3329379
Posted By: Jack Campin
26-Mar-12 - 07:31 PM
Thread Name: More stuff about the circle of 5ths
Subject: RE: More stuff about the circle of 5ths
That's a useful and common stunt - it's also used in those modulating traditional dance tunes I mentioned, on a smaller scale but for the same effect, and is used in pretty near every ceilidh band set in Scottish or Irish dance.

But there is no circle involved. Just moving up and down from tonic to dominant or subdominant. You don't need to think about getting from G# to Eb in any disco set.

To introduce the matter of "pure temperament" into this thread is:
A. Off the subject; and
B. Needlessly confusing to a beginner.


And telling them they're using a tonal system that lets them modulate 12 times in the same direction and end up where they started is useful?

I introduced pure temperament simply because it is something your insistence on total chromaticism makes incomprehensible. And that incomprehension can be prevented by simply not talking about ET-specific tricks until they matter. Being able to modulate right round a circle is NOT a fundamental skill, and is absolutely useless for anything relating to any kind of music anyone would would describe as "folk" or "traditional". Developing fancy diagrammatic representations for it with millimetric accuracy by compass constructions (as in josepp's original post in this thread) is simply adding totally pointless graphical refinements to a not very useful concept.