Mohajira

What is Mohajira? Mohajira is an amazing temperament that doesn't exist in 12 but does in 24. Mohajira is fantastic melodically, and sounds beautiful. The downside to Mohjira is that it is a neutral tonality meaning neither major nor minor thus resulting in a fairly static tonality. The fundamental chord is a neutral chord which splits the perfect fifth evenly in half. The result is a somewhat ambiguous, but completely new sounding tonality in it's own right. However, the nature of the neutral chord is static harmony, or droning. Mohjira and many neutral tonalites resemble the sound of a pentatonic scale meaning they can get boring if used for straight harmony. Not that it can't, depending on how far you go.

Basically Mohajira is a temperment of building scales out of neutral thirds rather than perfect fifths. Mohajira seven, AKA the neutral diatonic scale is the highest you can go in Mohajira without introducing a third type of step into the scale. The notes C Ev G Bv D F^ A make up Mohajira 7 if we add another we get C^ which adds a quarter tone into the mix. I feel this breaks the sound of mohajira, quarter tones can be used melodically but they don't sound right in mohajira for some reason. This isn't a rule as quarter tone theory is so new, and I'm making most of this up based on what I think sounds good, except for the mohajira part, of course.

The thing to note is that this is a new tonality that doesn't work like major and minor, neutral is a whole different animal and will take some experimentation to figure out how it works.

Neutral Diatonic on C:  C D Ev F^ G A Bv C

Musical Example:

Listen to how in my piano composition, Autumn Winds, the neural tonality gives the piece. It feels somewhat bright and hopeful, but still more serious and yearning. Hard to describe, but I think it's an emotion we don't have in 12.  Another thing is due to the ambiguous, pentatonic like sound of a neutral chord, melodies with neutral chords sound more melodic than with major and minor chords because there is no harmony expectation to pull away from the melody.

Other than the embellishments at the beginning, the main chord used in this piece is a D neutral seventh add nine chord or an DN7add9.  By itself, neutral triads can sound off, but when put with ninths and seventh and playing around with voicing, I think it sounds considerably better. This is probably because technically, the neutral triad is not like major and minor, it's ambiguous meaning the neutral third is more kin to a perfect fourth or fifth as in it's an interval without a real tonality. BUT keep in mind, that it's not exactly like the perfect fourth as neutrals are something completely new. Think of Mohajira as replacing all the major and minor intervals with neutrals thus creating something completely different than the regular major and minor scales.

In this piece, I voiced the main chord with the an octave over the neutral 7th. I think this works better as the neutral third tends to slightly clash with the root, so I think of the 7th as more of the third of the chord. If that makes any sense.

Yeah, we're all learning how this music works, play around with Mohajira. It might be capable of more than we think. It's one of the most beautiful features of quarter tones!!