[goldfeld]

Ethiopian culture is as ancient as the bible and rich with ancient wisdom, western music has a limited number of standard modes and oriental music offers a lot of variety there. We go just by greek heritage coupled with african aggregations. You would say a student of raga should be "obsessed" sbout particular ragas to full immerse in them? Also just exploring and hearing non-western music is a marvellous experience if you find the good parts. I'm doing something not so oriental, as I'm learning Chinese rock songs to help language acquisition, and been posting about that[0].

0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/who-led-me-here--xie-tian...

[gnulinux]

On a second read of your comment, I must say, I slightly misunderstood you and replied with this misunderstanding. I think if the music itself is "obsessed" with a certain structure there is nothing wrong or bad or misguided about being "obsessed" with that structure. In this case, if these modes are truly ubiquitous in Ethiopian music, nothing wrong with teaching, studying or using them. My original post was intended for people who are learning from scratch. I think it's better to understand the intervallic structure of a given music or musical repertory, instead of just the scales. But there is nothing wrong with scales themselves, as they're truly very useful models of music.

[gnulinux]

I'm very familiar with non-Western music and I studied music theory in abstract, not tainted with Western bias. There are models of music that are universal and found in all cultures, these directly come from the acoustic/physical properties of music. When I said the most fundamental building block in pitch based music is intervals, I didn't mean to say that for Western music, I really did mean "music". "Music" is a universal concept, found in all cultures, anthropologically we don't know of a culture that doesn't have "music". Although "music" is wildly different in each culture, it can still be studied in a generic way. Not all cultures necessarily have pitch based music, but if we do find pitch in music, intervals are the most fundamental tool to understand it. In Western music intervals are 12TET (an octave divided into 12 equal parts) but this doesn't have to be the case, this is merely an arbitrary convention. However, in other cultures we still do see intervallic treatment. These intervals may not be the same (e.g. Balinese Gamelan uses various tuning system, some similar to 9TET and 5TET (i.e. divide octave into 9 or 5 equal intervals).

In short, my comment above applies to Ethiopian music as well, so does it to any music.