User:AthiTrydhen/Schönbaumia

This page is part of a worldbuilding project. It describes musical tuning concepts from a fictional alternate world, rather than the real world. It may contain references to people, cultures, or places that do not actually exist, or events that did not actually happen. This does not mean that it can’t be used to make real music—it still could be; it just means this article shouldn’t be used as a factual source about real history or traditions, or as a source of terminology and principle compatible with real established common practices and conventions.

Various incidents and music theory ideas from a hypothetical parallel universe, Schönbaumia, which is very similar to our world but with a key point of divergence

Emil Schönbaum

This parallel world is named after Emil Schönbaum, a fictional violinist who started learning from Leopold Mozart, but the latter was on vacation when Schönbaum was learning the harmonic minor scale, so Schönbaum spontaneously "fixed" the augmented second, an interval quality which he hadn't previously learned, by shrinking it and widening the major seconds in the scale such that they ended up the same width. This made an LsLLsLs scale ("Schönbaum Minor") which Leopold Mozart was very much impressed by, and he along with fictional mathematician (name) developed 11edo as a formalization and completion of this scale. The idea behind this is that Leopold Mozart's method already involved 55edo, in which a semitone was 1\11.

Schönbaumian Notation and Keys

One of the first notation proposals in Schönbaumia for 11edo was by Frank Wheat, proposing ABCDEFΓ as the nominals (Γ is the Greek letter gamma). The accidentals are A#/Bb, C#/Db, D#/Eb and F#/Γb.

The important difference between Schönbaumian and diatonic tonality is that the easiest modulations are by a "minor third" (in-universe called a perfect third) of 3 steps. This means C minor differs from A minor by only one tone, E, which becomes Eb. Similarly to diatonic tonality, the third mode of the Schönbaum minor is the Schönbaum major, which differs in that the third tone is sharp by one step of 11edo. This scale has a skeletal chord built on the tonic (see below) and is a favorite of composers a century after Schönbaum.

Schönbaumian Tonality

The Schönbaum Minor scale has two chords which are called skeletal chords and serve as tonics. In the key of A, they're A-C-E and C-E-Γ. Note that unlike the major and minor chords in conventional tonality, skeletal chords are inversions of each other, and modern theorists and teachers in Schönbaumia speak of the skeletal chord as the one with the shape 0-4-7. Thus the A minor scale has skeletal chords built on E and C.

The main source of tension and resolution in Schönbaumian tonality is provided by the suspended chord, B-D-F, often expanded to B-D-F-A or Γ-B-D-F.