Modes have nothing to do with sharps or flats. Modes are about the intervals between individual tones, and not about the notation of these intervals. Sharps and flats as we use them come from major-minor tonality. To explain ‘properties’ of modes through the use of sharps and flats when they are transcribed is to impose a major-minor perspective on them. No strawman, and no self-righteousness. (And we can go into the origins of accidentals if you really want…save to say that if sharps make things happy, everything written prior to the sixteenth century was pretty damn miserable.)
God, you are so irritating. Let me put it this way:
What is the interval between the 5th and 6th degrees of an Aeolian scale? Yes, a semitone.
Now, what is the interval between the 5th and 6th degrees of a Dorian scale? A full tone.
Other than that difference, they use the same tones. If you’re talking about quality, ErinPuff is spot on about Dorian being “brighter”. This is simple circle-of-fifths stuff here. That’s why everyone is in agreement about Lydian being the “brightest” classical mode.
And I know you understand what I’m talking about. I get the feeling you’re being intentionally obtuse and I wish you’d cut it out.
The circle of fifths is derived from the structure of major/minor tonality.
Jpeg—Gorilla is technically correct, and I don’t think he’s trying to be a pedantic ass. The modes do only have their sharps and flats in relation to the major scale. If you read old modal church music, you won’t find accidentals.
How do you write D dorian? What key signature do you use? C Major? D Minor?
I would probably guess C major. Same with C dorian. Do you write it in C Major? C Minor? Or B-flat Major? It’s all arbitrary because modes don’t technically have sharps and flats.
And how do you notate something like Hyperlydian which has a raised fourth and a flatted seventh in relation to the ionian? And where does it fit into our “bright vs dark” scale with one sharp and one flat?
Actually, I didn’t mean “hyperlydian” but rather lydian dominant.
Thank you - I’m not.
But I’ve spent plenty of time buried deep in Myxolydian and Dorian music…and I can tell you that the feeling for the individual intervals is crucial. Otherwise you end up with Vaughan-Williams.
And I speak as someone with a lifelong interest (and now professional reliance upon) the many and various ways in which we deceive ourselves and each other, sometimes without meaning to. I’m happy to benefit from your expertise, and it sounds like you’re happy to benefit from mine. Hallelujah the Dope Boards.
I take on board everything that you have explained to me, and I’ve benefitted from it. Thank you for taking the time to explain. Next time I have occasion to go over the same ground, I’ll be able to word my point with greater care.
Okay, you’ve fought my ignorance successfully. But my point wasn’t really to do with whether the post-pitch-shifted piece of music is the same, so much as whether it would be considered the same, and have the same emotional impact, for all but the most expert ears, regardless of which key it was being played in.
In my previous post, I was merely rehashing something which I know annoyed me a great deal during my own attempts to learn about music, and which I think derailed some of my own early musical learning and interest. I apologise for over-stating my case. Let me be a bit more level-headed about it.
There are things that many music teachers say in many music classes, and which get recycled in many introductory and intermediate music classes and books, which I think should be open to question. Take a statement like: “Pieces composed in minor keys tend to sound sad or mellow”. My response to this is that it’s interesting if it’s true, but nobody has shown me any proof that it IS true, or why it should be so, and I think it should be open to question. Where is the empirical support for this? Has anyone done the simple scientific experiment that would support this contention? Let’s line up a dozen simple piano pieces, half composed in minor keys and half in major. Let’s play them in a randomised order to a cross-section of listeners. Let’s ask them to describe what they hear in emotional terms. Wouldn’t this be interesting? And if the expected correlation is found, then let’s look at why it’s there, and what this tells us about how the mind works. And if the correlation is not found, well, that’s interesting for you music experts, isn’t it?
Or what about taking one piece of music and transposing it into several different keys, and likewise playing the variations to a cross-section of listeners and collating their responses. Again, wouldn’t this be interesting? I think it would, and I think these kinds of experiments might confirm some ‘sacred cows’ of music theory and throw others into question.
I guess that in all my dealings with music teachers and experts (and I’ve had plenty), I’ve often felt dismayed by the way some assertions which I think are at least open to question and worth re-evaluating are just bandied around as if they are indisputable and unquestionable facts when they may be anything but.
This kind of stuff can matter. In the world of audio hi-fi, there are people selling all kinds of very expensive dreck that is supposed to improve hi-fi quality, but which is in fact just an expensive ripoff having no effect whatsoever. This can only happen when people are prepared to just go along with whatever they are told they should expect to hear, instead of saying, “Hang on, how can I test if this is really the case? How can I check if I’m being misled or not?”.
Indeed, it is not universally true. In Byzantine sacred music, there are 3 (really 4) modes: diatonic, enharmonic, and chromatic, the latter having soft and hard variants. None of them correspond exactly to Western scales, but diatonic is very close to Western minor key, and enharmonic to major key. Chromatic has no good Western analogue – its intervals vary widely, from greater than a whole Western step to less than a Western half step. Anyways, the Byzantines saw the diatonic scale, very close to minor, as being a joyous, solemn, contemplative, celebratory scale – it’s the scale used for most Easter hymns. The enharmonic, very close to major, is aggressive, masculine, martial, powerful, warm. The chromatic is sweet, sorrowful, delicate, feminine, cool. To the Byzantines, then, the major and minor keys would have had a much different connotation than they do to modern Westerners.
Well, yes but to say that “Taps” is sad because it’s played at military funerals merely begs the question, “WHY is it played at military funerals?” If that’s all it took to make a piece sound sad, then we could start playing “The Wheels On the Bus Go 'Round and 'Round” at funerals (starts with the same notes by the way!), and everyone would think THAT was a sad song.
It’s not simply the notes or tonality of “Taps”. It’s the fact that it begins with what is clearly, from the rhythm and the notes, a resolution to the tonal, which sounds very final, bringing forth the feelings of the finality of death. The slow tempo accentuates the solemnity of the occasion, and the tone of the bugle reminds us this is the same sound the soldier hears on the battlefield (at least in a past era). Taps is also played as a military “Lights Out” at the end of the day, so its use at a funeral lends a bittersweet “Good Night” to the proceedings.
I can’t argue that there’s some bad music teachers out there. But there’s also the difficulty of giving succinct and correct answers to vast pandora’s-box questions. The other day I got asked “where did key signatures come from?” - should I have briefly summarised a millennium of music theory? Or was the brief and partial answer that I gave regarding modes and transposition adequate? Likewise, the fact that “minor keys tend to be used in sad pieces” is valid, because the majority of pieces we can agree are ‘sad’ do use minor keys. (Although it’s certainly not OK to say ‘minor keys sound sad’.)
It was actually written as a mournful substitute for Lights Out.
Comparing it to the British equivalent, the Last Post, shows that the resolution at the opening isn’t relevant - the Last Post opens with a move away from the tonic. I wouldn’t actually describe the tempo of Taps as slow, but in any case to say that “slow=solemn” is as misleading as “minor=sad”. And if the timbre of the bugle is important, does the piece therefore lose much of its impact if played on a different instrument?
So much for the nitpicking. What makes these pieces mournful isn’t anywhere in the music, but in their extra-musical associations. Most of us only ever hear them at funerals, remembrance services, etc., so they are imprinted in our minds with these associations.
I don’t see the relevance of this. A piece does not need a resolution to the tonic to qualify as appropriate funeral accompnaiment. I am merely pointing out some qualities possessed by the piece that make it homogeneous with the setting where it’s usually heard, qualities other pieces, such as the “Beer Barrel Polka”, for example, simply do not possess.
I would descrive it as slow, and the setting where it is used as solemn, just as I did before. The tempo enhances the existing mood in a way “The Arkansas Traveler” could not.
Go to a military funeral where “Taps” is played on an accordion, and you tell me.
By your argument, if everyone began to have Katrina and the Waves “Walking on Sunshine” played at their funerals, it would suddenly become a sad song.
I don’t buy a word of it.
Nitpick: there’s more than one type of Western music and scale. The classical scale you refer to is no doubt the dominant Western scale, but there are other instruments of an antique pedigree that use other scales.
One of the best-known is, of course, the great highland bagpipe, which uses a pentatonic scale and different intervals, with a result similar to the Mixolydian mode. We use the standard note names and notation for our music, but only as a matter of convenience. For example, our A is closer to a Bb, which affects the entire scale since every other note shifts accordingly. And we don’t normally indicate that the C and F are sharp, since it’s irrelevant to our playing and because they’re actually a bit off from C # and F #. Anyone listening to the scale notices the difference from the classical scale.
I’m not sure Gorilla is arguing that at all, especially since he argues there are some general emotional associations with major/minor tonality throughout the rest of the thread.
I was under the impression that he was talking about ‘Taps’ in particular. While I disagree with his assertion that Taps is not slow, there is nothing in the music itself to suggest mourning. At least to me there isn’t. I think our associations with ‘Taps’ and death are more experiential than innate. If anything, to me Taps sounds very dignified and majestic, not sad at all. It’s the tempo that makes it sound solemn. Speed it up, and you’ve almost got yourself the intro to a swing tune. Play “Mary Had A Little Lamb” at a similar pace and you’ll have the same thing.
However, you’re not demonstrating that these qualities are inherently sad, only suggesting that some association possibly exists for us between those musical features and the solemnity of the occassion. And in any case, identifying single such features in one piece doesn’t help, because those same features will occur just as frequently in music that we would all agree would be inappropriate. Therefore, those features neither enhance or detract from the appropriateness of the music for the occassion - something else must be doing that.
Ad hominem.
No, I’m not. However, there’s plenty of ‘common funeral songs’ which aren’t in any way sad (Imagine, I WIll Always Love You, and other such drivel), which nonetheless are found to be approptiate for the moment. So there isn’t anything inherent in these examples - the acquire their approptiateness by context alone. As with Taps and the Last Post.
I remember my Psychoacoustics lecturer said that just tuning was a way of reconciling the modes of vibration of the instruments we use with our mostly tonal music (based theoretically on a mathematical scale/ specific frequency ratios).
When you measure the modes of vibration of any plate like the front of a piano or the top of a violin for instance, you will get strong resonances at different frequencies giving rise to what is called a ‘dissonance curve’. this varies from instrument to instrument but the ones used in Western music work best when justly tuned to suit our scale systems. Modes of vibration of these instrumental ‘plates’ are disgustingly complicated if I remember correctly. For example if you had every octave at exactly double the frequency of the one below you would find that different notes would resonate more than others and in an unbalanced way giving rise to a perception of ‘dissonance’ in the sound which is unpleasant to us. So just tuning is a way of compensating for this.
I came to do my Masters from a music degree so I was never that hot on all the physics behind this but maybe some pschoacoustics or sound-physics expert can explain this better.
See this link for the lowdown from more learned people than me:
The first site you linked to goes through calculations for finding the frequency of middle-C given a frequency of 440Hz for A above middle C.
However, in the sixth step in the table at the bottom, it declares that multiplying the frequency of B by 3/2 gives you an F, which you drop an octave and raise a fifth to middle C.
But a fifth up from B is of course F#, so the calculation comes out wrong.
If you look at the parent page of that one, you find that the whole site was put up by a twelfth grader over five years ago, so we’re not looking at the most authoritative of sources here anyway.
Looks like the author is still doing web pages. No e-mail, just a guest book.
Well, that does make sense. I had a feeling it was something like this, as the author came up with the exact frequency for C# in an equal tempered system.