In one episode of the Britcom “Red Dwarf“, a robot suggests that the traditional 7-pitch musical scales should be changed into a 10-pitch scale, making it work with the metric system. In this show, this is suggested as a joke, and is accompanied by that truly horrific laugh-track that accompanies any Britcom. But it’s really an interesting idea, if you think about it.

It’s nothing new, though. People have been messing around with scales for ages. For example, most people are familiar with the sound of a pentatonic scale, which is used in every culture in the world (but western children will usually say that it sounds “Asian”.) And then there’s the octatonic scale, a favorite among jazz musicians and late romantic composers. Claude Debussy continued this tradition of scale-play by stretching standard tonality to its limits. In his piano composition, Voiles (meaning “veils), he uses a 6-pitch scale called “whole tone.”

The effect is marvelous – it feels like we are floating! On one hand, we have a sense of a tonal center (a “home key”) thanks to the pulsing bass, and simple melodic figures. But on the other hand, a couple more pitches in the scale, and we begin to question where we really are.

Ah, the sounds of the sea …

Many people are familiar with the visual art of the Impressionist movement – the Monets and Manets. Impressionist Music retains a strong place in the history of Art Music – so much so, that it is now considered a linking era between the romantic and modern eras. As I spend a week’s vacation near the seaside, I continue my oceanic thoughts with one of the most famous Impressionist pieces of all time – Claue Debussy‘s La Mer. The third movement is titled “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea.”

Alternate title: GuilloTUNEs

France’s Fourth of July takes place on the fourteenth of July – Bastille Day (or, as the French prefer to call it, the much nicer-sounding La Fête Nationale), the beginning of the French Revolution. Now technically, the real beheading party didn’t begin until a few years later, Still, the guillotine has become the iconic icon of French liberty and justice.

Which is why I bring you this – iconic French composer Hector Berlioz‘s “March to the Scaffold”, the fourth movement of his Symphonie Fanstastique. Written in 1830, after two generations of political turmoil, it is a testament to the hardiness of humanity and our need for beauty in an ugly world. This Symphony is historically important because it fueled the romantic obsession of programmatic music; it also introduced an idea Berlioz called the idée fixe – a musical motif or melody which is attached to a specific thought, person, or idea. Out of the context of the whole symphony, the idée fixe won’t have much meaning when you listen to this single movement. However, that doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it.

Programmatic music is the idea that music can convey a non-musical story or idea. Sometimes programmatic music composers can be cryptic; other times they are very specific. Berlioz is the latter! He provided this awesome, drug-inspired summary of this head-rolling movement:

Convinced that his love is unrequited, the protagonist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes somber and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.