Diatonic Dia = across; tonic = a scale that has tonic note or "home
base" (in the diatonic scale: "do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti", each scale
tone "leads" the listener toward the tonic note which is "do").
Enharmonic Same sound, different note spelling. For example g# and
a-flat have the same sound. (Violinists will argue that they are not
EXACTLY the same, but they are close enough for our purposes.)
Chromatic Uses lots of sharps and flats. Chroma = "color". In early
manuscripts the accidentals, that is, the sharps and flats not in the key
signature, but added occasionally throughout a piece, were actually written
in colored ink, presumably to be easily readable. Metaphorically, even
today, we speak of music with lots of sharps and flats as being "colorful".
A chromatic scale goes like this: c, c#, d, d#, e,f,f#, etc. You could
use flats, too, if desired, usually for downward chromatic passages. A
chromatic instrument has all the possible naturals, sharps, and flats in a
scale available--the piano, the pedal harp, the cross-strung harp and the
Welsh triple harp are chromatic instruments.
On the pedal harp, all strings (with pedals off) are tuned to flats. Move
the F pedal one notch and ALL the F-flats on the entire harp become
F-natural; move the F pedal to the next notch and all the F strings become
F#. So if you want to play F# in one octave and F-natural in another
octave simultaneously, and you've used your pedal to set F#'s which affects
all octaves, you can't play the one F-natural on an F-string. You'll need
to pluck the e-string with pedal on the second notch to set it to E#. E#
and F-natural are "enharmonic"; they sound the same. This is where the
lever harp has an advantage. You can simultaneously play F-natural in one
octave and F-sharp in another octave, if you ever wanted to. (Might sound
weird--but Hey!)
Rolliana Scheckler