A Scale! Ahava Rabbah!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahava_Rabbah

I'm a Jewish atheist, or Humanist, or Pastafarian, or whatever. I don't believe in gods, but I'm Jewish. Figure it out if you feel so inclined (Wikipedia can help). But the Ahava Rabbah scale is one of my favorite scales (mentioned in the last post as well), also known, according to the article linked above, as the Spanish phrygian, Jewish scale, Hungarian scale, or phrygian dominant. I'll stick with Ahava Rabbah, at least for now, but it really is a phrygian with raised 3rd.

I love this scale. I suppose the augmented second sounds "mystical", which in today's postpostmodern age is quite the cliche, but to me it really does. Listening to liturgical music that uses it makes me feel, well, elevated, which I'm sure the religious would interpret as "closer to Hashem". (This is because the religious can't write "Adonai", as that is using the name of God in vain -- instead, they use "Hashem", meaning "the name", in writing and singing, and they use "Adonai", "Lord", in actual prayer. They will sometimes use "Adoshem" when emphasis on pronunciation is necessary, and "Elokeinu" for "Eloheinu". Now you know.) The point is that I love this scale, and modulating to it is an interesting touch, much like that major chord in a minor piece that is like sunlight.

The typical cadences in Ahava Rabbah are not V-I as might be expected, since the 5 chord is actually vo rather than the v that you can change into a V. Instead, the cadences are bII-I and bvii-I (the convention is confusing and I can't be bothered to follow it; hopefully this is clearly referring to the chords on the 2 and 7 of this scale). bvii is especially nice, because since the important half step occurs between 3 and 4, an improvisatory-style melody would tend to hover around there, and the 7th degree would be a refreshing note to signal the cadence. In some chanting schemes this is actually done. A nice melodic cadence using bvii-I would be, in C: Bb' F E Db C; the Shabbat prayer Shalom Aleichem uses this, though the position of the tonal center makes this a half cadence instead. In fact, this is just the conventional phrygian cadence of Western tonal music, iv6-V, but with the function of an authentic cadence (and since this is used in mostly monophonic liturgical music anyway, with no attention to inversion numbers).

But yeah, Ahava Rabah, awesome scale.