Comment by brudgers
13 hours ago
The slight of hand in standard Western European music theory is that stacking 5ths gives you Lydian and its tritone as the foundational seven pitch scale. Major/Ionian is the fourth mode of this scale.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…except when it comes to science as a basis for an argument from authority.
Like all music, people like what they like.
For that matter, the first 5 stacked fifths gives you the standard pentatonic scale. Extending by a fifth on either end and you get the most common accidentals in Western music (if your first seven give C major you’ll get F# and B♭). I think (but I’m not sure) that some of the non-Western microtonal scales extend the tonality by not ignoring the Pythagorean comma when you’ve done the 12th fifth, but by continuing to stack fifths for more harmonies.
From C the first six stacked fifths give C Lydian, not C major. (You get an F#, the 5th of B as the seventh pitch, not F the 5th of Bb).
You don’t get the perfect fourth until you go all the way around the circle of fifths.
You cannot stack perfect fifths and get a major scale.
I was being sloppy and should have said diatonic scale.
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