Here’s something that people who aren’t musicians don’t understand about music: music is inherently unoriginal. You can say this about all forms of art. If you changed out the music concepts and replaced them with techniques of painting, mechanics of writing, limits of technology, or even the structuring of businesses, the concept would ring true the same: originality is dead, and it collectively our fault (and not at the same time).
Why All Music is Unoriginal
In Western music, there are 12 notes.
Really only a specific pattern of 7 of those notes sound good together. We call that the major scale.
Out of those 7 notes, only 5 of them sound good together no matter which order you play them.
Most of the music you’ve heard in your life use these 5 notes exclusively. This is the major pentatonic scale.
Sometimes one of the other two notes in the major scale will play a brief part in a song. But even then, they’re briefly played and usually switch to a note in the major pentatonic scale. On occasion, an obscure note outside of the major scale entirely will step in to add some flavor to the song.
But 95%+ of the music you’ve heard in your life was written on 5 notes.
