On the Changing Use of the Major and Minor Modes 1750–1900

[1.0] INTRODUCTION[1.1] One of the overarching properties of Western music since the late Renaissance has been the division between major and minor modes. While these modes share many commonalities, they are often used for different rhetorical or affective purposes. Although Zarlino limited his comments to the major and minor intervals, his emotion-related descriptions of major and minor (1558, Part 3, Ch. 10) nevertheless resonate with the experiences of modern listeners. In a well-cited experiment, Hevner (1935) showed that major- and minor-mode renditions of the same passages lead to different affective associations for Western-enculturated listeners: predictably, the minor mode is associated predominantly with sadness, whereas the major mode is associated predominantly with a happy or positive affect (see also Temperley and Tan 2013). Of course there is more to major and minor than these simple associations suggest. The development of the major/minor distinction has a rich and convoluted history (see, e.g., Lester 1989). Even Hevner's perceptual experiment found that the minor mode carries other connotations apart from sadness, such as "seriousness" and "exoticness." In light of this past history, we might ask a more empirically-driven question: Just how are the major and minor modes used in Western art music, and how has that use changed across history?[1.2] Ostensibly, both the major and minor modes might be used in passages that are loud or quiet, fast or slow, staccato or legato. However, certain associations have been widely observed. For example, formal empirical corpus studies have shown that the minor mode is more likely to be associated with a slower tempo (Post and Huron 2009) and with quieter dynamics (Turner and Huron 2008 ; Ladinig and Huron 2010). One interpretation of these results is that this cluster of features is consistent with the expression of "sadness." For example, research in speech prosody has shown that sad speech is slower, quieter, lower in overall pitch, involves smaller pitch movements (i.e., monotone voice), and exhibits more mumbled articulation compared with non-sad speech (Kraepelin 1899). Experimental evidence in the perception of emotions in music is also consistent with these observations (Juslin and Laukka 2003).[1.3] One way of interpreting the minor mode is that it is similar to the (more normative) major mode, with some of the pitches lowered. Experimental work has already established that lowered musical pitches sound sadder than their unaltered versions. For example, Huron, Yim, and Chordia (2010) had listeners judge the sadness of tunes played using artificial (random, non-equally tempered) scales. Listeners received different prior musical exposures to different scales, so that for some listeners certain pitches sounded "lower than normal" whereas for other listeners the same pitches sounded "higher than normal." When asked to judge the sadness of identical melodies, those listeners who heard the melody as containing lower-than-normal pitches judged the melody as sounding sadder than other listeners who heard the identical pitches as sounding higher-than-normal. This suggests that it is appropriate to view the minor mode as symptomatic of "lower than normal" pitch--congruent with judgments of sadness in speech.[1.4] Interestingly, the harmonic minor mode exhibits another property that is consistent with research related to sadness in speech prosody. As noted above, sad speech is more "monotone" than non-sad speech, involving smaller pitch excursions. Huron and Davis (2012) conducted a study to find the musical scale with the smallest average pitch size. They took 300 common major-mode melodies and measured the average melodic interval size for each melody. Using computational methods, they systematically created all of the possible combinations of scale-degree modifications by one semitone (such as raising the fourth scale degree and concurrently lowering the second scale degree). …