ABSTRACT

The melody is one of the important elements making up the music, and it is essential in the study of music. The characteristics of melody changes depending on how the notes are manipulated in terms of time and space. The concepts of scale, mode and key are related to such manipulations. A clear understanding of scale, mode and key is important in understanding of melody as fundamental elements of music as well as important elements in distinguishing and characterizing different songs or musics of different people and different times. However, the current textbooks and teacher`s guides either do not define such concepts clearly or contain different informations, creating a confusion for the teachers and the students alike. The purpose of this writing, therefore, is to analyze the contents and methods of the current textbooks regarding scale, mode and tone, and to present better explanations and methods. Foremost, the analysis of the textbooks for high school students and 1st year junior high school students regarding melody-related concepts and types shows that they lack consistency in presenting concepts and types of scale and that explanations were not clear. Details of the analysis are as follows: First of all, the concepts of scale must be sorted out. Most textbooks do not present the concept, and overall consistency is difficult to achieve. Second of all, when presenting the types of scales, clear standards and classification system of scales for students must be employed. Third of all, when presenting concepts and types of scales of Korean traditional music, the part for which the academic world has consensus must be presented uniformly. Because there is a need to present the concepts and classification system of scales uniformly, the following draft has been introduced. 1. Definition of concepts related to scale In a broad sense, scale is defined as arranging notes used in music according to a set of rules so that the definition of scale will include music of the world and modern music. The mode, in a narrow sense, means the church mode in the Middle Ages and defines a scale that has tonal center in a broad sense. Only when used in a broad sense, it must be differentiated from the church mode in the Middle Ages either through tonal system or designation. The key refers to the phenomenon where a central note takes a dominance and other notes maintain a subordinate order around the central note(keynote). It is an embodiment of tonality within a tone scheme through scale or mode. When the meaning is restricted to the designation of the pitch of a keynote in a certain scale or mode, it is referred by the name key. 2. Arrangement of scale types