Conference Agenda

The pentatonic scale has become a mandatory tool in the arsenal of modern jazz improvisers, connecting the consonance of the past with the dissonance of the present; this paper maps the historical development of anhemitonic pentatonicism around the globe to contemporary jazz. Pentatonicism has long provided a source for extramusical meaning whether a composer is representing their own nation through folk melodies or pointing outward through exoticism. How is it that this collection can look towards the occidental, oriental, boreal, and austral, both into one’s own past and at the alterity of another’s present? Despite the assumed prevalence of pentatonicism, its historiographic scholarship is surprisingly limited. This paper therefore relies on the few modern texts and looks to historic treatises, global music theory, ethnography, and folkloric studies to paint the fullest picture possible.

The primary modern text regarding pentatonic prevalence, Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy, carefully considers the manifestation of pentatonicism throughout the history of Western art music and touches on its origins through means of anachronistic semiotic signification (Day-O’Connell 2007). This only narrowly answers the seeming ubiquity of the collection, though. Rameau discussed this collection as a connection between Pythagoras and Chinese theorists in his Code de musique pratique (1760), although the name pentatonic would not come until Carl Engel coined it in his The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864). This paper will connect these dots of pentatonicism with writings and music from such wide-reaching locations as China, Scotland, Ethiopia, and Appalachia.

This omnipotent presence has afforded unique manipulations in jazz improvisation. A novel contribution of this paper includes the documentation of pentatonicism's unique implementation throughout the development of jazz styles. The collection finds its way into harmonic realization, melodies, and improvised lines alike, and not only in its anhemitonic form. Jazz musicians have employed techniques such as superimposition, side-slipping, and chromatic alteration to achieve dissonant sonorities from the historically consonant collection. Using pedagogical works from practitioners alongside ample transcription, this paper outlines the specific ways in which pentatonicism both entered into jazz and became a vessel for chromatic exploration.