Western music

Western music is a broad category of music that includes all musical genres that use 12-note chromatic scale, including Western classical music, rock and roll, and many other forms of popular music. The word Western may be misleading; although much of this music came from Europe and North America, important contributions have come from places like Russia and Japan.

Western music developed out of the creatively fertile framework of Western philosophy that had its birthplace in ancient Greece. Pythagoras experiemented with intervals of sound based on small integers, which we recognize today as the 12-tone chromatic scale. From these logical roots developed the chants of early Christian tradition, first monophonic, and later polyphonic and including instruments.

See also