*SJW reeeing in the distance*
You’ve all heard this one, but have you ever considered where it came from?
(Besides “Asia”, moron)
Well, now you know!
The Oriental Riff is, in fact, a European/American invention, a musical stereotype if you will of the music of the far east. For you see, the base scale of the music of the Far East is the Pentatonic (five note) scale as opposed to the diatonic (8 note) scale that is used in Western music, and we’ll be learning about pentatonics another time. Thus the Asian riff is a simple harmony of open fourth chords using a pentatonic scale.
D, C, A, C is the basic riff. And with a few simple fourth interval chords, we have the riff.
Simple enough, but now comes the tricky part: where did it come from, if not Asia itself?
A lot of investigation has been done on this, believe it or not, and here’s what I found:
The earliest thing that sounds kind of like it is by somebody named T. Comer, who if my research is right is Thomas Comer of Boston Massachusetts, the church organist of King’s Chapel in Boston. He composed a score for a stage play of Aladdin and his magical lamp that used pentatonic scales and similar rhythms but not the true Asian riff. This is the closest thing any research has found to something remotely resembling it, although it doesn’t quite sound like it to the untrained ear.
(Some of you might be asking how a middle eastern story has the far east riff…well, the original Aladdin story kind of takes place in “China”, which is to say a predominantly Muslim east Asian vassal state of China…that’s a whole different can of worms).
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