source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 00:08:33 +0200 Subject: modes From: "Collins, Gordon" Pieter Smit wrote: >Could somebody please explain modes (Dorian, Frigian, Aeolian, etc) to a >newcomer on the list, or refer to literature explaining these? The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians has an excellent description under "Mode". See also under "Tonality" for more on the difference between modes and keys. Several of the articles in Music Theory Online also illuminate the distinction. Look around in http://boethius.music.ucsb.edu/mto/mtohome.html Standard books on Western music history *ought* to have good descriptions, but many I've seen are very sparse on the pre-Baroque era. Discussions tend to get thwarted by different usages of the word "mode". For example, Bill Alves appears to view modes as little more than types of scales. (They are very often described as such when an author is trying to be brief, perhaps the cause of the growing general impression that that's all there is to them.) Daniel Wolf sees modes in certain patterns of harmonization. I use the term as the composers themselves did when indicating that a composition is composed *in* a particular mode, as (for example) Merulo did with his toccatas. I believe this is how other Medieval and Renaissance writers used the term as well. This is analogous to saying that a Mozart piano sonata is *in* the key of C Major, but as the above articles show, there is an important musical difference. My comment that started this off would be expressed more accurately, I think, as: Very few, if any, (Western classical) works have been written *in* a mode in the era of 12TET. Gordon Collins Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 30 May 1997 12:51 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA02215; Fri, 30 May 1997 12:51:08 +0200 Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 12:51:08 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA02212 Received: (qmail 19434 invoked from network); 30 May 1997 10:50:42 -0000 Received: from localhost (HELO ella.mills.edu) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 30 May 1997 10:50:42 -0000 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu