Traditional Burmese Musical Scales and Notes
Ingo Stoevesandt wrote in his website book “The Music of Southeast Asia”: “Long discussions and false comparisons have mislead scientists to believe that the traditional scale in Burma is equidistant like the one in Thailand. If we keep a close look on the oboe "H'ne" among the instruments, we will see that this scale is not perfectly equidistant. The names of the tones on the scale indicate their heritage from the playing of the oboe: "Hna pau" means "two fingers", "thou pau" means "three fingers" and so on. This scale is fixed for every kind of chamber music, while it is used in the ensemble music only if the instruments used within are tuned this way. [Source: Ingo Stoevesandt, The Music of Southeast Asia ///]
“The scale is read by western eyes like a diatonic scale put backwards, following the descending tendencies of Burmese music. Not indicated are the microtonal differences in the pitches of the fourth and seventh note, which have almost disappeared today, leaving a hole in comparison with diatonic scale. The "old" scale is still in evidence in the tolerance and acceptance of pitch discrepancies and mistuned instruments by the Burmese audience and by cadencing formulas which sound "unfinished" to western ears. The fact that names used in ensemble music are different from those used chamber music shows that chamber music has to be understood as a kind of "modal music"///
“There is a fixed hierarchy for pitches in the chamber music, condensing in scales which are strictly bound to cadencial patterns and phrases. Each pitch knows its "friend" ("mei") note, which is commonly a fifth higher or a fourth below. All "modal" scales appear like pentatonic scales with two side notes, which always get performed in unstressed positions and in high registers. ///
“Unlike in India or Java, these "modal" scales do not know proper circumstances to be used, the reason for this might be that there would be too much time and effort to retune an instrument. In case a "modal" change appears, only the retunable instruments get retuned while non retunable instruments simply leave out the tones which the instrument doesn't provide. This practice may also explain why the two central scales of the chamber music, in which either the second and sixth or the fourth and seventh tone appear as separated tones are left out while playing. Most of the melodical phrases start with an octave and end on the main tone. ///