[snickell]

Tuning (at least in our universe, due to the distribution of the prime numbers) is an exercise in tradeoffs. Indian classical music makes a different tradeoff than western classical (or its direct and indirect descendants), which gives it GREATER freedom than western some areas, and less in others.

Its true that Indian music doesn't modulate (~change keys).

If your goal is modulation (~changing keys), than Indian classical is limited. If your goal is amazing perfectly tuned chords, intricate tuning patterns, and complex relationships between the tuning of notes and rhythms, then Indian classical is MUCH freer than a western-style equal temperament scale.

Modulation (changing chords), as a priority, was a choice made in western music in the 1600s. That choice had downsides, in particular western classical lost access to a larger palette of beautiful "edge of consonance" tone and chord coulors.

Analogy: at its extreme Western classical paints complicated rapidly shifting geometric patterns using a tiny set of "sort of meh" slightly-gray primary colors (think: Escher), Indian classical paints colour fields using a vast array of rich colours (think: Rothco).

The holy grail would be complicated shifting geometries, and complicated shifting colours. These turn out to be in direct tension for math reasons. (Can explain more if there's interest, Pythagoras (yeah, that one) thought there was no tension between the two, but he measured wrong, and the roman catholic church actually encoded "there is no tension between the two owing to the power of God" as dogma, which caused no end of pain for pipe organ makers, who directly knew the two were in tension).

Western classical used to use less regularized tunings, even Bach played (and comnposed for, and imo should be played in) a not-fully-modernly-even tuning. These tunings came from the ratios of integers (directly, or prime numbers, indirectly) and while the chords are unfamiliar in a modern context, looooong held notes tended to be very satisfying to listeners in these "ratio of integer" tunings (or integer ratio) tunings.

That's where gregorian chant comes in, if you hit these exact ratio tunings, once your ear is used to it, chords seem to glow so beautifully you could listen to them "forever". The problem is that switching root notes on a fixed-pitch layout like a pipe organ or harsichord keyboard isn't fully regular.... very roughly (and this is wrong, but conveys the idea) "holding a base note, and the note five keys above it" will sound totally different depending on the base note you pick. This comes necessarily from the math.

So you either end up with an almost infinite variety of physical keys..... or you fudge (tamper, temper, temperament) the pipe organ pipes to "split the difference" and share a key between two not-quite-fully-consonant chords rooted at different base notes.

Unfortunately, now all your chords are a little.... fudgey sounding.... so nobody likes to hear them for a loooooong time (the longer you listen, the more clear the mistuning becomes), so you tend to move faster between chords.

In a nutshell, as European music started wanting total freedom to move around, from anywhere to anywhere, and have each 5-note-pair have EXACTLY the same ratio (resulting in our completely regularized modern tuning equal temperament), the chords themselves were less solid, so you move faster and faster. Once the chords aren't quite as nice, you want to move faster and do elaborate patterns, and the cycle fed back on itself until we got where we are today.

Indian classical made the opposite tradeoff, they traded off harmony, and the ability to root harmony at any point in a fixed keyboard, in return they got a larger variety of VERY interesting tonal colors.

I found western classical tuning VERY limiting due to the lack of colour palette (and, personally, very subjective naturally, I don't find increasing the number of colors to 22-edo or whatever to help, its just 22 muddy colours to my ears... I only need a few colours but I want them to be gorgeous lol ;-)

[jariel]

So that's some valiant rhetoric, but I don't think you've made the case.

There are dozens of scales within 'Western Music' and there's many musical variants which allow 'notes in between'.

Stringed instruments easily allow for the variation in chord intervals as you've mentioned, yet they're generally not used in the manner you've described, because I don't think that's the tradeoff being made.

("holding a base note, and the note five keys above it" will sound totally different depending on the base note you pick. This comes necessarily from the math." - I basically don't buy this. A perfect 5th sounds essentially the same whatever the root note is)

There are far more forms, far more instruments, far more variation of ensembles (how many ways to re-arrange 50 different instruments).

And it's spawned 100's of genres.

So even if the 'interval argument' holds, and I don't think it does, it does make up for that much.

There are many examples, but the best to illustrate the diversity in a snapshot would be Jazz.

[snickell]

A perfect fifth is the only chord in the equal tempered scale which is very close to a simple (small prime factors in the ratio) just intonation, they're only like 0.25% different. Not surprisingly, its one of the most common chord components in modern ET to hold for long periods. An equal tempered perfect fifth really close to a 3:2 ratio "just fifth".

On ET, /all/ the major thirds express exactly the same ratio, as do the fourths, minor thirds, etc etc etc. The tuning is designed carefully to give this regularity. Every chord has exactly the same ratios involved, no matter what note you start it from.

That's very much not true of just intonation scales, and then there's the many scales lying between equal and just like well-tempered, etc etc.

Most music that isn't derived from the western scales has tunings that are expresable very accurately in just intonation, and do not align well with ET tunings (until the tunings shifted with cheap electronic ET-tuned instruments).

Western/culturally-most-common 12 tone-ET music (aided partly by western instruments like midi keyboards) definitely are the most common today, but that is a relatively modern phenom.

This isn't to say that "the old was better" or "the new is better".... they're just... tradeoffs.

Dismissing one of the most seriously pursued classical music traditions (whole extended families sole-y professionally devoted to it for hundreds of years allows massive intergenerational knowledge transfer and thereby accumulation) as being less flexible because its less flexible in the axis your culture has particularly prized strikes me as.....