Yeah, I was hasty. Of course you can transpose any segment of intervals, including a chromatic scale. The point is that a chromatic scale is a special case of a symmetric scale which includes all pitch sets (and therefore, all pitches).
That's important, because to a beginner in tonal harmony the combination of "scale" and "key" is like a pedagogical sandbox. The intervallic profile of the scale serves to reinforce the very idea of music being in a key-- it extends to the system of harmony as triads are stacked thirds within that given intervallic profile. So everything has guard rails which serves to reinforce the relationships between tonic/dominant harmonies, cadential formulas, and so forth. Those guard rails are important since the modulo math of starting on different scale degrees to generate church modes can be conceptually confusing-- at least you've still got the lynch pin that the quality of the chords in a I-IV-V progression is unique to the major scale.
It would be a twisted pedagogical move to pair the starting point of "chromatic scale" with "key" because suddenly there are nearly no guardrails. Sure, you've got the placement of the "starting note" at the beginning, and you could give that an agogic and dynamic accent when playing the scale to emphasis "tonic." But there are no other clues for the listener about harmonic or scale-degree hierarchy. You've literally removed everything else.
It'd be like teaching beginners how to dribble a basketball, then moving directly to how to call a time-out before you fall out of bounds. I can imagine how strange that team would be. And I can imagine how weird the music would be from a python programmer who incrementally builds a sophisticated program for the purpose of deploy chromatic scales in various keys. In both cases I certainly want to experience the result, but in neither case would the participants be building on "the basics."
Yeah, I was hasty. Of course you can transpose any segment of intervals, including a chromatic scale. The point is that a chromatic scale is a special case of a symmetric scale which includes all pitch sets (and therefore, all pitches).
That's important, because to a beginner in tonal harmony the combination of "scale" and "key" is like a pedagogical sandbox. The intervallic profile of the scale serves to reinforce the very idea of music being in a key-- it extends to the system of harmony as triads are stacked thirds within that given intervallic profile. So everything has guard rails which serves to reinforce the relationships between tonic/dominant harmonies, cadential formulas, and so forth. Those guard rails are important since the modulo math of starting on different scale degrees to generate church modes can be conceptually confusing-- at least you've still got the lynch pin that the quality of the chords in a I-IV-V progression is unique to the major scale.
It would be a twisted pedagogical move to pair the starting point of "chromatic scale" with "key" because suddenly there are nearly no guardrails. Sure, you've got the placement of the "starting note" at the beginning, and you could give that an agogic and dynamic accent when playing the scale to emphasis "tonic." But there are no other clues for the listener about harmonic or scale-degree hierarchy. You've literally removed everything else.
It'd be like teaching beginners how to dribble a basketball, then moving directly to how to call a time-out before you fall out of bounds. I can imagine how strange that team would be. And I can imagine how weird the music would be from a python programmer who incrementally builds a sophisticated program for the purpose of deploy chromatic scales in various keys. In both cases I certainly want to experience the result, but in neither case would the participants be building on "the basics."
Edit: clarification