Thread by @Silpayamanant

Bless their hearts. I guess this is a natural consequence of colonial harmony.

"Three systems of harmony"
reddit.com/r/musictheory/…

Colonial harmony is basically the result of treating a small sample of global harmonic traditions as Universal and Neutral.

https://twitter.com/Silpayamanant/status/1420953005910896651

There are plenty of ways for music to be vertically arranged, and those ways multiply once we get outside of diatonic tuning systems.

https://twitter.com/Silpayamanant/status/1440389660308434944

And Western Pop Music (WPM) as a global phenomenon is just the latest stage of exporting colonial harmony.

https://twitter.com/Silpayamanant/status/1464790878942334985

*Colonial harmony* is a perfectly good way to frame it (though it is a little ambiguous in some respects), though *Western harmony* works just as well. The creation of "The West" &the harmonic traditions associated with it go hand in hand w/ colonialism.

https://twitter.com/Silpayamanant/status/1456255914911145988

Also, just as the same set of pitches can be used in several different maqams/modes/scales/etc., the same sets of [extended] tertian harmonies can define different harmonic languages. Add in non-diatonic pitch sets and harmonic traditions multiply.

https://twitter.com/Silpayamanant/status/1467170148368928775

Similar ideas to the *keys* *key signatures* fundamentalism discussed here regarding WAM/WPM-centrism w/r/t global harmonic traditions (or the ignoring of them as it were).

https://twitter.com/Silpayamanant/status/1465028348242014210

And yeah, I’ll be exploring this in this talk:

https://twitter.com/silpayamanant/status/1466864033106124808