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This series of posts is an attempt at making sense of musical modes in order to learn to improvise Celtic-sounding meditative tunes on the Irish flute. It has been near impossible for me to improvise while playing music because I learned to read music first, and I have not been able to disconnect from the idea that I must play a tune exactly as it is written. Even memorizing the tune or learning some of its variations hasn't helped much. To undo this pattern, I need to deconstruct the music I play and rebuild it from its foundations.
To follow my thought-process, it helps if you have some foundations of music theory; that you understand the basics of scales, intervals, chords, and chord progressions. I'll review some items but for the most part, I gloss over the foundations. You also must be willing to geek out on the topic of "finding out why this or that mode works best on this particular instrument"!
I've written a lot of opinions in here, many of which are probably questionable – please send a note if you feel I'm making wild generalizations or assumptions (you can write anonymously! [TODO]). There's also some analysis that I think is correct but could be off the mark.
I'm not an expert in many of the topics discussed here, least of all improvisation, Celtic music theory, and the Irish flute/whistle. I don't speak as an authority in these topics, but I am sufficiently well-versed in acoustics (for which I happen to be an expert), the mathematics of musical scale design, and basic music theory, that I think I created a compelling illustration for why certain modes and certain pentatonic scales are well-suited to improvise Celtic-sounding tunes on an Irish instrument. I did all my analyses for an instrument in D, but the logic applies to any instrument.
Note: I use the word "flute" but everything in here works exactly the same for the whistle.
from this site, which asks that we "stop overcomplicating modes" 🙄
The confusing way to talk about modes
The confusing way to talk about modes
When I first heard about the modes, it was presented as a way to create new scales from shifting the nodes of the major scale (the "white keys on the keyboard" starting from a C). I heard that modes were popular in some variants of rock music. Using the "C scale" while starting on a different note sounded contrived, and silly, and the resulting scales had a bizarre feeling to them. I forgot about them for 30 years, until I started humming scales at a meditation retreat. I realized I wasn't using strict major and minor scales, and I got curious about what mode(s) I was gravitating towards.
Note: when I say black and white keys, I'm arbitrarily referring to the colours on the piano or accordion – harpsichords, spinets and some synthesizers use black for the main notes and white for the incidentals.
When I learned music theory as a child, I was instructed to take the major scale for granted, and to lower three notes in the scale: the third, the sixth, and the seventh – to create the minor scale. We were also instructed to construct 12 different major and minor scales using all the possible notes (see picture on the right) and learn them by heart.
There were so many unanswered whys.
Why make seven white keys if we are going to use all the combinations of black keys to make other scales? Why are there 12 total keys to start with? If every semitone interval in the dodecatonic scale is to be used, why bother having 7 white and 5 black keys? Why not 6 blue and 6 pink keys? Why is the major scale so important that we gave it the white notes of C? Why is C so important? Why lower the third, the sixth, and the seventh to make a minor scale?
There are great answers to some of these questions if you look for them. And to be fair, there were some items that were well explained in my music theory classes; for example, that there was a circle of fifths and that it explained why, when changing keys, it was good to follow it so that you would have near-seamless transitions, because you wouldn't alter more than one note of the scale at a time.
But it took me 40 years to find out why, out of thousands of possibilities, the major and minor scales became these strong anchors in Western music, and why other modes are still used to this day to add colour to some melodies.
from wikipedia
Next post: The twelve notes
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