As a player of a Celtic Harp I am interested in this topic, although I am self-taught and I don't know a lot about the theory behind all of this. I love Middle Eastern music, and I believe that the scales they use are not tempered. I have a video tape of Robert Plant and whasisname - had to look it up - Jimmy Page - of Led Zeppelin fame playing with an Egytian band - brilliant!! Called "No Quarter - UnLedded".

The Egyptian music may have been modified slightly to play our scales but it sounds to me more like Plant & Page have modified our scale to fit their music. They have been interested in that style over many years and it shows most obviously in the song Kashmir.

I realised that many of the pop songs I really love have that Middle Eastern sound to them, including The Rolling Stones song Painted Black.

I saw the Howard Goodall documentary. It was very interesting and enlightening. I also have on tape - taped from the show - a documentary called "What is Music" (described briefly here) which examined a large range of interesting aspects of music, including the way sound changes when it gets louder. They used a trumpet as an example and said that digital sounds of a trumpet, at that stage, did not replicate the sound very well because of the changes over the time that the note is blown and depending on loudness.

Also relating to the harp: the Harplist (e-mail list) often discusses pentatonic scales, and when I flip the levers in a certain pattern on my larger harp which has levers on all strings, I can change it to pentatonic scale. Alan Stivell apparently used this tuning for a number of his tunes. The advantage for the harp music in doing this is that all strings are then in harmony with each other and it increases the sound quality of the harp because the harmonics it sets up creates a much fuller sound.   

Lately I have been thinking about different styles of music in relation to different scales, and wondering how it would work on the lever harp - i.e. mainly whether there would be too many accidentals requiring too many lever flips within one piece of music. I heard a Jewish song accompanied by harp a couple of days ago on the radio and I noticed that the tuning sounded different. The main (the only??) advantage to having to constantly retune harp strings is that the choice of tuning can be made with relative ease.

Helen