What is it that makes the pitch similar in both Celtic and Arabic music, and why is this pitch unusual in other western music?
In: Culture
You’ree probably thinking of the pentatonic scale which is used in Celtic music a lot, and Western music that imitates far eastern music
This will probably get taken off, but with my general knowledge of various European and Asian languages, I can tell you that Arabic and Celtic have very similar grammar rules and thus the way the languages flow could cause the same sounding music.
Langfocus has a Celtic and Semitic comparison video.
I remember a bagpipe presenter come to my middle school. He told us the bagpipe originally came from Jordan. I thought that was really cool. The bagpipe was like one of those white instruments but then I learned it’s origins were in Arab. Not an answer to your question but similar
For an extremely generalized answer: Indo-Aryan (Iranian, middle-eastern, etc) music tradition migrated westward as did ancestors of today’s Europeans, early on.
I am thinking the notes and divisions of western music has to do with the development of the organ with its fixed pipe lengths, and of the clock with the regular time scale. Thus the desire to regularize the music to a system where it can be reproduced more easily from place to place.
Somewhere around the mid 13th century air driven pipe organs replaced the water type from ancient Greece. And at the same time in the development of science, the idea of a regular time measured with a pendulum or a clock mechanism drove the music world to a more structured way to annotate and reproduce music.
I’m pretty sure countries where Celtic music tends to come from are considered the western world. I’m probably mistaken as maybe Western world is a modern term and Celtic culture originated long ago. Curious is all. I know I’m a dum dum.
Slightly related but off topic question: why are Arabic fonts on various websites so tiny compared to English? Don’t they have a hard time to read? I’ve seen this everywhere on mobile as well as PC.
It’s all scales friends. Different parts of the world have tendencies to use certain scales. Look up those scales, use the notes found in them to create a melody that sounds nice in any given key, and your composition should sound similar to what your hearing.
I’m not sure what similarity you recognize between Celtic and Arabic music, I personally don’t see one. However, we do have to remember that music is entangled very closely with our emotions. The similarity that you’re hearing may have to do with a particular mood, memory, or your personal relationship with certain intervals.
Did you just watch the Maz Jobrani special too? Because we just did last night and I had the exact same thought.
So I’m gonna borrow a little bit from Saphir-Worf (which thanks to Arrival and fevered dreams right after, I’m a little obsessed with now) – how much of the Celtic language and Arabic language influenced their unique musical approaches? Same for Hindi since it was mentioned here. I speak 2 of those 3 (kinda) so I’m even more curious now…
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