minstrel: Re: minstrel-digest V1 #465

[Evelyn Wolke]

Good lords and ladies --

I am usually a lurker on this list, but I was reading the thread and hope
that this will help.

Much of the Beatles' music is in various modes, and it has the advantage of
being familiar, if not period.  There is a book you might find in the
library,  _Twilight of the Gods:  The Music of the Beatles_, by Wilfrid
Howard Mellers.  It really helped me in my understanding of the working of
modes and helped me later when I got serious about folk music and its
various tonalities.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Dierdre Kyle
(I'm a lady and I have the Paperwork to prove it)
Bard-in-training...

At 03:21 PM 4/14/98 EDT, Vanessa Layne wrote:
>
>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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