Of Modes And Key Signatures

[Anglo-Irishman]

 

Modes are easy: just play the white notes, and each starting note is a different mode. The major scale is jsut one sort of mode.

 

This is correct in as far as it goes but surely modes could start on any of the twelve notes in an octave and would then be a mixture of black and white notes on a keyboard?

 

True, but then it would be rather difficult to visualise and experiment with. The "white piano keys" model is only one of several possible models. You could also take as an example a single row of an Anglo concertina, and start the sacle on any button in either bellows direction. Or a tin whistle, without cross-fingering or half-covering the holes. Or a harp. Or a single-key diatonic autoharp. Or a mouth-organ (without bending any notes). The characters of the different modes would stand in the same relation to each other, irrespective of what key your instrument was tuned to.

 

In fact, my personal theory is that the idea of identifying and deliberately using modes arose in an environment in which simple, diatonic instruments were widespread, and the idea of harmonisation had not yet emerged. By varying the mode, you can get quite a bit of variety into your performance, even though you've only got those seven notes to work with.

 

Modern classical music can achieve its effects through harmonisation and key change using the chromatic scale (with the possibility of accidentals), so it manages with only two "modes", major and minor.

 

Cheers,

John

[Jack Campin]

my personal theory is that the idea of identifying and deliberately using modes arose in an environment in which simple, diatonic instruments were widespread

 

It arose and reached its most systematic development for vocal music, particularly the liturgical music of the Christian churches and the secular art songs of the Arab world. It developed in parallel in India, where the voice was also regarded as paramount and instruments were made reflect what voices could do - i.e. even if the hardware design didn't look promisingly microtonal, as the music evolved more microtonality, playing technique had to keep up, hence the embouchure and fingering tricks of the bansuri to make it play any scale you can think of.

 

 

By varying the mode, you can get quite a bit of variety into your performance

 

That's how folk musicians use modality in practice, but it's exactly what the art music modal system WASN'T designed for. Both in Christian liturgies and traditional Arabic performance, you stuck to the same mode for an entire show; in the Moroccan nubat that could mean eight hours with no modulation, and in the Syriac liturgy to the present day, each month in the church calendar has its own mode. The idea in the Christian liturgy was to help the singers (usually monks) to stay in tune - if the mode kept jumping around they'd lose it. In the Arabic context (borrowed and extended from Greek ideas, though the scheme probably predates the Greeks too) it was more about humoral and astrological consistency; variation of mode could be physiologically disturbing. You'd keep the mode constant and vary the rhythm and the character of the text. I have been to performances of Turkish art music organized that way; two hours in the same mode. It's a very different experience from a folk session.

 

Ditto with the Indian ragas - you pick one that suits the season and time of day and stick with it without adding a single chromatic note for however long it takes - maybe hours.

 

It was adapted to allow modulation - the most extreme version being the Persian radif, where hundreds of explicit modulatory cadences are catalogued, the entire modal system being a gigantic finite state machine - but that was a much later development.

Edited October 11, 2015 by Jack Campin

[Bullethead]

I'm finding this topic fascinating because I've never had to mess with modes at all prior to getting into concertinas in the last few days. Thanks for all the info. I think I'm beginning to understand the concept of how mode and key are related so now here's how it looks to me at present. Please bear in mind that I know essentionally nothing of musical theory, just the minimum needed for bare survival, so please correct me where I'm wrong.

OK, here we go....

 

Mode seems mostly to describe what I call the "character" of the melody, i.e., where within the range of notes in the tune you find the 2 obligatory half-tone steps in Western octaves (I'm sure there's a technical term for this amongst music theoreticians). The position of the half-tone steps in relation to the lowest note of the melody can make the tune sound happy, sad, or whatever, or give it a stereotypical geographic or ethnic flavor. There seems to be a strong connection between mode and genre.

 

So it seems to me that most (maybe all?) tunes will be in some mode or other, as a natural by-product of how Western octaves work, even if the author is completely ignorant of the whole mode concept and the mode is never specified on the sheet music. IOW, "mode" seems to be a descriptive term, a way of dividing tunes into groups simply on where their half-tones fall in relation to their lowest notes. But it has nothing to do with the specific tones used in the melody, which potentially could be anything so long as the relative positions of the half-tones are maintained.

 

However, most musical instruments and human voices have limited ranges, and sometimes tune authors want melodies in a specific range of notes because they like/need that sound. So you have a tune, which has its (often unknown) mode encoded in it automatically by the "character" of the melody, and you want to write it within a certain range of tones. But in Western music, we're stuck with the half-tones defaulting to B/C and E/F. If these half-tones aren't in the correct position for the tune's (secret?) mode, then you have to add sharps and/or flats to move the half-tones to where they need to be to make the melody sound right. IOW, you have to specify a key that supports the underlying mode of the tune.

 

So it seems to me that mode is a sort of fingerprint of a tune's tones relative to each other, and is a product of the authoring process, whether this is done deliberately or instinctively. If all you ever do is sing or hum the tune, then it's not tied to any specifc range of tones and so you can describe it simply by its mode. But when you write it down or play it on an instrument, you "open the box of Schroedinger's Cat" by pinning the melody down to a specific range of tones. Which means you now have to specify a key to preserve the tune's mode. Which means that key is not an independent variable, but is just explanatory informaton made necessary by constraining a given mode to a specific range of tones.

 

If this is view is correct, then I can see why modes have disappeared from common knowledge. Over time, vast corpi of many genres of music have accumulated and most (all?) of them have some mode associaed with them. At the same time, most instruments have "favorite" keys, either because those are the only keys possible for them, or it's just physically easier to play those keys. So these days, if you want to write a certain genre of music for a given instrument, you tend to write it your "favorite" key, and because you're writing a specific genre in that key, the mode happens of its own, and it fits the key because the key was invented to allow that mode to be played within that range of tones. Then the sheet music gets distributed to people who only play tunes, not write them. The key signature tells the musician what note to play when to make the tune "sound right", which is all he cares about. Thus, even though the ancient mode is reverse-engeered by writing a specific genre in a specific key, neither author nor player need know it exists at all.

 

How's that?

[Jack Campin]

That's got something to it, but you can have modal systems within pentatonic scales that don't have any semitones, in which case you do similar mental operations spotting where the gapping minor thirds are.

 

More generally: in modal traditions, each mode doesn't just have a pitch set and a tonal anchor note, it has a bunch of melodic formulae you can use: runs, arpeggios, half and full closes. These might highlight semitones in distinctive places or they might not. In the makam system, you also have a systematized plan for the order in which you will highlight some specific notes in the scale as you run through the melody - you occasionally see that idea in Western music too. So your classification of what mode a tune is in is based on quite a lot of information which you patch together in your head. The phrase repertoire is a strong enough clue that you can usually spot the mode of a tune long before you've heard all of it.

 

One consequence of that is that the simple pitch-set-and-keynote model isn't fine-grained enough; there are distinct modes which use the same notes and end on the same finalis. Arabic/Turkish music distinguishes lots of these; the plagal/authentic distinction in Western liturgical music theory is along the same lines, making 8 modes instead of 4. We don't have names for many such distinctions in modern Western traditional music but that doesn't mean the distinctions aren't there.

[Mikefule]

 

Modes are easy: just play the white notes, and each starting note is a different mode. The major scale is jsut one sort of mode.

 

This is correct in as far as it goes but surely modes could start on any of the twelve notes in an octave and would then be a mixture of black and white notes on a keyboard?

 

Yes, but I was trying to give a simple easy to grasp explanation of the concept rather than explore all the possibilities.

[Bullethead]

@Jack Campin:

Ah, the sadly sweet pentatonifc scales..... In a previous version of myself about 20 years ago, I was a blues guitarist. But even with pentatonics, you still have to follow the key or it sounds horrible, and I've come to believe that the key is just there for the benefit of the underlying mode, of which both blues composers and players are almost universally ignorant .

 

I'm with you on the way that mode has nothing to do with the various pitches (=tones) used by a given tune. It just says where the half-steps fall in relation to the notes of melody. Mode is a melodic thing, so can be used with any given set of pitches, using any combination of white and black piano keys that result in the the half-tone steps being in the appropriate places for that mode. At least in Western music where octaves default to having 2 half-tone steps in them no matter what key they're in. I have less than zero knowledge of the parameters of the music of other ethicities.

 

So it seems to me that if you define a scale based on anything Western, you're stuck with 2 half-tone steps which are a fixed distance apart, and can vary the pitch up or down as needed to make any of the modes with Greek names. Thus, it seems that the only way to get more than 7 modes is to define the scale differently. Which isn't conceptually that difficult given that it's just a question of units of measure, all of which are totally arbitrary.

Edited October 12, 2015 by Bullethead

[David Barnert]

Still looking for Locrian tunes? My favorite is the French round:

 

[Jack Campin]

...which perhaps explains why church bells never caught on in bal folk.

 

BTW BarFly's "Analyze Melody" utility thinks it's in tetratonically gapped A Dorian with a flattened second. Gapped A Phrygian ending on the dominant would be my guess - the Phrygian gamut reduced to the tonic, a note each side of it, and the fifth.

Edited October 12, 2015 by Jack Campin

[David Barnert]

Actually, I hear it (in the notes as written above) as C mixolydian, ending on the 3rd. I want to put a big fat C under it. Then it becomes your basic blues riff: C E G A Bb A G E.