Penta means five, and tonic means tone. Armed with what Robertson says Kodaly and Orff say, I was curious to plink on the piano using these five tones, and soon decided there was more to this scale than just the simplification of matters. I began to wonder why it sounded so familiar. Then I remembered that I had plinked around with these same tones before, a long time ago, after reading that Irving Berlin composed using only the black keys. Maybe Irving's inability to play the piano properly had provided him with a mysteriously fundamental advantage.
Pentatonic melodies are often hauntingly beautiful.
When you goof around on the black keys, the melodies that result are almost automatically pretty. One aspect of all this that I haven't found yet is speculation on why particular melodies are used for particular phrases. If anyone has any theories on why certain melodies have become associated with certain phrases, I'd love to hear them. Seems like there have been two intertwined threads in this cat's cradle, one being the major pentatonic scale and the other being spoken intonation. It would be informative to sit down with a songbook of folk and popular song and analyze each melody for either its pentatonic makeup or its similarity to spoken intonation.