Every now and then, I hope to talk about things I’d like to learn this year and request your advice, dear reader, on how to do so.
The topic of modes in music theory interests me. Reading about it doesn’t really get me to any understanding of it. Anyone want to teach me about modes or direct me to any great online resources?
Thanks!
Advertisement
My understanding is narrowly technical and unlikely to help. But, I believe that a mode is something like a palette in color theory, with not just a set of pitches but also an organization as to which ones are most important or play different roles. Taking the key of C, we get a set of notes—the piano’s white keys—but there are different ways to emphasize these notes; a mode is usually listed as a scale on those keys, for example, there is one mode in the key of C that begins and ends on D (let’s see, it’s the… Dorian). Beginning and ending there treats D as the “tonic,” the most important note. But the scale ordering is just a shorthand for the mode. The other pitches take on different roles as well, like being used in certain standard sequences. So by taking the same set of notes and relating them and favoring them differently, I suppose we should get a different overall feeling from the music. I would love to hear why this should really be the case, and to what extent the qualities associated with these modes are merely learned tradition, like some of the tastes in wine-tasting (it seems awfully hard to recognize a mode!). Maybe you can research that bit for us?