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- Xref: sparky rec.music.folk:8710 rec.music.misc:29627
- Path: sparky!uunet!pipex!bnr.co.uk!uknet!glasgow!jack
- From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
- Newsgroups: rec.music.folk,rec.music.misc
- Subject: Re: Modes; was: Re: Reading music - book sought.
- Message-ID: <BzMLJF.Jy5@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk>
- Date: 21 Dec 92 20:14:03 GMT
- References: <1992Dec19.002432.20909@das.harvard.edu> <1992Dec19.135203.11801@das.harvard.edu> <1gvv7iINNn1v@agate.berkeley.edu>
- Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
- Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie
- Lines: 85
-
- lanih@herald.Berkeley.EDU (J. Lani Herrmann) wrote:
- > Permit me to try to untangle some of the confusion that surrounds use
- > of the term "modal."
-
- Unfortunately you mainly deepen the confusion with what follows, though
- I've no doubt you're accurately reporting what some musicians really do
- say...
-
- > The same term seems to be used to describe at least three distinguishable
- > phenomena:
- > 1. The relatively sparse, simple sounds made by simple instruments
- > such as lap dulcimers (contrasted with the rich, full, chordal sounds made
- > by guitars, pianos, organs, ...).
- > 2. The unchanging fundamental drone sound of a lap dulcimer or
- > bagpipe (contrasted with the shifting harmonies of "chord" instruments --
- > guitar, piano, ...).
-
- Neither of these has much to with it. Drones are used in music which uses
- major/minor tonality (like most Northern French musette or hurdy-gurdy
- music, or the bulk of Northumbrian pipe tunes) and in music which owes
- nothing at all to Western scales (like Indian classical music) as well as
- in Western modal idioms. Drones make it impossible to modulate very far
- from the home tonality, which motivates the use of extra modes for tonal
- variety, but there are quite a few musical styles that live with the
- limitation while not using any kind of modal apparatus.
-
- > 3. The archaic-sounding, uncommon (to modern sophisticated ears)
- > "chord" progressions, such as
- > a) the parallel movement of voices at an interval of a fifth or
- > fourth, with or without intervention of other voices to "fill in" a chord;
-
- This tends to happen more in modal music because it evolved separately from
- the harmonic tradition that required "chord progressions". As I pointed out
- in my remarks on the Sacred Harp, it isn't an essential feature.
-
- > b) the "subtonic juncture" or "Celtic shift" supposed to be charac-
- > teristic of Irish or Scottish music (such as the C major chord to the D
- > major, or the reverse);
-
- This is a real phenomenon in Celtic music, but it happens in major/minor
- pieces as well as in the other modes. It's an obvious way of getting
- tonal variety without a fully developed harmonic system; see previous
- paragraph...
-
- > c) the use of "empty" chords lacking one or another note -- there
- > are a lot of supposedly modal tunes that can't seem to make up their
- > minds whether to be "major" or "minor"; in fact (not their fault), they
- > simply lack (or avoid) the distinguishing major or minor third.
-
- This is what more recent terminology might call a "hack". Traditional
- music in the British Isles didn't have a harmonic accompaniment (except
- maybe for Celtic harp music, of which not a trace survived). So when
- people started playing it on new instruments that allowed harmony - first
- the cello, then the piano, then the guitar - they had to make it up. Most
- of the people doing this were from the gentry (how many farmworkers could
- afford a piano?) and trained in diatonic Western art music. They made a
- lot of very bad guesses about the modal structure of the tunes they were
- arranging. By the late 19th century this had become rather obvious (the
- worst examples may be some Irish arrangements whose source my brain is
- repressing just now). So what to do about it? If you're somebody like
- Bartok, you re-examine the whole way diatonic harmony works and generalize
- it to operate on several zillion folk scales so you can do natural-sounding
- modulations entirely within the melodic world of Transylvanian folk music,
- or even fit Romanian and Arabic music together and know what chords to use
- to get from one the other. This is a lifetime's full-time work for a
- genius. If you're just trying to get something that works for a ceilidh
- band and doesn't immediately suggest frills round the piano legs, you go
- for a quick fix: just leave out the diatonic harmony where it's misleading.
- Hence all these funny guitar tunings that miss out thirds. It *does* have
- something to with modal scale patterns, but it's a secondary development.
-
-
- There's a bit more to mode when you have multiple voices with different
- ranges to integrate. This is where the "authentic" and "plagal" modes in
- Gregorian chant came from: it doesn't ask singers to produce more than an
- octave, but the finalis can either be at the ends of the octave range
- (authentic) or in the middle (plagal). This distinction presumably exists
- in polyphonic folk music, like that of the Georgians, Bantu and Basques;
- anybody know for sure?
-
- --
- -- Jack Campin room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
- 17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RZ, Scotland TEL: 041 339 8855 x6854 (work)
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