Aaron Rabushka wrote:

>When I was teaching an adult music appreciation class some time ago I
>played the first movement of Debussy's "Nocturnes." At one point this
>features a pentatonic melody that, to me, "sounds Chinese." One of the
>students was from Taiwan and he didn't hear it as such.

I would guess that this was because it takes more than the pentatonic
scale to make "Chinese-sounding" music.  After all, many cultures
throughout the world use this scale in various ways.  I know practically
nothing about Chinese music, so I can't say exactly what makes it unique,
but its harmonic system is probably quite different from the Western one,
so that even our pentatonic scale doesn't approximate it very well.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]