What came first

I'd bet major scale by about a millenium

I think I vote for chicken and egg.

I'm hardly the definitive source, Alex. Ancient music really isn't my thing.

What I do know is that both scales predate recorded music. Pythagoras set out his thoughts on interval relationships about 2500 years ago... that sort of implies that the major scale steps preceeded him - he was analyzing the relationships, rather than creating them.

I've read somewhere that music in China is documented before that, but I've not done any research on it.

To interpret music prior to written history, historians use instruments they've found. About 15 years ago, several intact flutes dating back 7-9,000 years were dug up in Jiahu China. Some pieces that I've read about the flutes say they are 'remarkably similar to the do-re-mi scale'; others say they're based on a C-D-E-G-A pentatonic.

Even if we know exactly the scale used then, new discoveries might alter our understanding. A part of a 50,000 year old bear-bone flute was discovered a few years ago, but I think the fragment only contained two holes - too little information to discern the scale.

In my view, both are older than we can prove, and I don't know which came first :)

I just found an article on the reconstruction of the 50,000 year old flute - the guy who did the reconstruction can make it play EITHER scale!

http://whyfiles.org/114music/4.html

50,000 years ago?

thats an unbelievable amount of years ago, i think jesus time was far away...

now multiply the distance between us and 00 AD and multiply it by 25..

impressive..

so would you say that its the major scale first because that can be played??

like if pentatonic came first, the major scale couldnt be played could it?

or is this just a hole and he changes the pitch when he blows?

I think we'd probably have to go back a very long way to determine exactly what was around and when. If you look at some of the far eastern scales that use two or three notes, a lot of them have their origins in religious ceremony and it makes sense that instruments of some description would have been developed to reproduce the notes consistently. Those would probably predate major and pentatonic scales by a considerable margin.

Some of the discussion of pythagorean tuning and intervals ( http://www.medieval.org is a good starting point) refers to octaves with up to five degrees of sharps and flats between two notes, so I figure that the major scale itself was probably a derivative of something else which was in use years before. I guess we'll never know for sure.

Best,

A :-)

so would you say that its the major scale first because that can be played??
like if pentatonic came first, the major scale couldnt be played could it?
or is this just a hole and he changes the pitch when he blows?

The fact that both scales can be played simply suggests they MIGHT have been around. If an older instrument is capable of playing a pentatonic, but the other two notes required for a major scale can't be, that would at least be circumstantial evidence that the pent was older, at least in that part of the world.

The problem there, of course, is that fixed pitch instruments (like fretted instruments) came after variable pitch ones in most cases. We're not likely to find a 70,000 year old piano out there... but we might someday find a variant on a thumb piano, xylophone, or something else that gives us more clues.