minstrel: Re: minstrel-digest V1 #465

[Vanessa Layne]

Re: Modes --

Many (many :) years ago my then-piano-teacher tried to explain modes
to me, but she made the mistake of using only scales for her examples.
That is, she played (and had me play) each modal scale starting on the
tonic, walking up to the next tonic, and then back down.  I absolutely
failed to get modes from this.

The irony (to my mind) is that when I made up tunes on my own, at
least half of the time I naturally wrote in a "modal" scale
(myxolydian is my favorite, with dorian after that).  I didn't get the
connection between what I wrote and what my music teacher had been
trying to explain to me till about 6 years later, under someone else's
tutelage.

I'd suggest that you have musical examples in each mode, so they can
hear what a *tune* in a mode, and it's harmonies, sound like.

You might also want to at least mention the difference between "modal
music" (which is all chant) vs. "tonal music" (which isn't), and
"tonal music in modes", which is what I suspect most of us care about
-- perfectly ordinary tonal music which happens to be neither major
(ionian) nor minor (aeolian).  While this may seem to be
hair-splitting the jargon, these differences in terminology are used
by, among others, the nice people who write books on this.  So the
students should be given a heads-up about how the pros use the lingo,
so if they want to read further on their own, they can.

You might also want to mention that in the same way a piece of music
can modulate from one key to another in the middle (and sometimes does
so without bothering to change the key-signature, just using a lot of
accidental sharps and flats), modes are keys, too, so you can modulate
through them, too.

-- Tibicen
   (the one who did the modal improv at the War of the Roses bardic
   trials so many years ago....)
   dagoura at mit.edu

P.S.  The comment about guitar cords is right -- maybe you can come up
with a chart of the cords for each tone in the likely modal scales?
It would be a big chart, but you could skip a lot of keys (B-flat
phrygian is not likely to come up much, now is it? :) to keep the size
down. -- T.

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