From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk,rec.music.misc
Subject: Re: Modes; was: Re: Reading music - book sought.
Date: 21 Dec 92 20:14:03 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

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,
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