source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 21:50:24 +0200 Subject: JI modes From: Daniel Wolf My words were chosen very carefully: '' composing in various modes has been a continuous and central part of >_musical training_'' Although the art repertoire indeed became Major/minor, the training with the church modes remained quite traditional. Composers learned with Fux well into the nineteenth century (and again in the late twentieth century: indeed, the fashionable Schenkerian training is fundamentally Fuxian), and the further one gets from the German repertoire the more one is likely to encounter ''modal'' practices. You'll find plenty of examples in French, English, Spanish, Northern, and Eastern European art musics, and Schumann - to go to the center of the German tonal repertoire was extremely fond of modal writing. (I don't know quite what to say about the German chorale tradition where old, distinctively modal melodies are harmonized tonally - this is still a standard exercise for music students). Above and beyond this, the folk repertoires tend to be either only exceptionally or nominally tonal! If the example of contemporary vernacular idioms is at all relevant, one may be easily persuaded that modulating, functional tonality held a leading position for a limited time in only a select repertoire, and the greater part of music heard has been modal since - as my great grandfather put it - Hector was a pup. You wrote: ''By the 18th century, the theorists had caught up with the composers...'' For an alternative reading of the relationship between composers and theorists, the chapter on ''Professional Theorists and their Influence'' in Milton Babbitt's _Words about Music_ is certainly worth a look. We tend nowadays to place theorists and composers in fixed positions with regard to one another, and this simply does not bear up historically. In considering any single theorist, one must be very careful to distinguish the aims and limits of his (sadly, not often _her_) work and the audience to which the work is addressed. One must often pry deeply to decide if a theoretical work is descriptive or prescriptive, or if it is historical or speculative. And then one must evaluate the influence - if any - that a work has had on real music making. The persistance of species, modal counterpoint as an element of musical training well into eras when the fashionable idiom was very different is, on one hand, a testament to the value of the training in the development of general musicianship, but is perhaps an expression of deeper structural connections among repertoires whose material surfaces are radically different. This is a point that intonational theorists and microtonal composers desperately need to consider in detail (and is fundamentally connected to the constant plea by list members for better compositions!): devising new musical materials - a tuning, for example - is not difficult at all; devising ''interesting'' or ''effective'' or ''convincing'' or ''musical'' ways of using those materials is extremely difficult. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 21 May 1997 22:40 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA07148; Wed, 21 May 1997 22:40:07 +0200 Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 22:40:07 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA07141 Received: (qmail 6304 invoked from network); 21 May 1997 20:40:03 -0000 Received: from localhost (HELO ella.mills.edu) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 21 May 1997 20:40:03 -0000 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu