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Comments
I’m you’re ONLY hope sister!
To your original point, this is one reason why I experiment with alternate tunings on guitar - because my hands ‘go down the same old roads’ and those roads travelled can get old. Therefore I find new ground by experimenting this way
Awesome. Thanks for getting my head back to thinking about the possibilites of music.
@McDtracy, I, too thought it was a little gem, but it may be a lot more than that!
Tristano was an outlier. Most bebop players improvise on chords. The accomplished ones transcend the harmony, but that doesn't change the fact of the harmonic foundation.
This permanent posts fighting here on the forum starts to be tiresome. This degrade its ambiance, really. Perhaps it could be a great reminder to read the following article instead of talking about music in an absolutely non musical way:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll?wprov=sfti1
I’ll be right here when it clicks... IF it clicks.
one shouldn’t struggle when in a trap, especially when it’s of your own making.
Take a step back from the idea that "back in the day it was much harder to make music"
modal music wasn't invented in response to bebop. Modes are prehistoric. In western music, they refer to the church modes, but there are modes from all over the globe. Indian classical is a great example, from what I understand, there are 22 pitches from which scales and modes are typically derived. Further, modes really don't mean what modes meant in ancient musics. In equal temperament, they are bastardized and a detuned mode is not the mode it pretends to be. Most of the world's music has been modal throughout history. The non modal music of the twentieth century is a drop in the bucket of an ocean of sound, a glitch in the matrix. And all one has to do is listen to early balinese gamelan recordings or even more ancient musics such as:
for a little perspecive.
or Buxtehude 
to shatter the notion that western harmony prior to the twentieth century was somehow less complex.
listen to some Forqueray
a conversation about modes without taking tuning into account makes no sense whatsoever. What IS a mode? What IS a scale? What IS an interval? can we admit that the 12 tone scale is a fairly arbitrary solution to the pythagorean comma? the names of the greek modes that we use to describe western harmony are NOT the original greek modes. Those modes were in Just Intonation and sound entirely different than what most people assume they sound like.
So if you look back to your youth and think, "damn, kids these days have it so easy, they don't even have to learn scales and theory! they can just strum around in thumbjam or make a complete track in a given app without understanding what is going on behind the scenes." realize how silly this statement is. It's the age old situation of old people decrying technology as evil and failing to see that their own life was full of new technologies. Imagine someone from a few centuries ago peering into your youth and exclaiming in disgust "they didn't even have to build
their own instrument and tune it by ear like I did." because for most of humanity, that has likely been the norm.
Consider that A440 12tet has been the agreed upon standard for less than a century. Its advent aligns with the mass production of pianos and fretted/keyed instruments. So one could easily lament the fact that people don't have to build instruments from scratch and learn tuning theory to come up with a tuning system to create music from.
There will always be great music. Technology allows us to focus on different aspects of the spectrum of sound. I'll admit, it makes me sad that most musicians are clueless to the foundations of tuning, of how vastly it informs the kind of music one creates... how we went from centuries of using the full spectrum of color, to settling on 12 crayons out of sheer laziness. Most musicians coming out of conservatories can play all the scales very well, but don't understand what a scale IS. A given tuning defines the music we make, yet most musicians give tuning little thought. Bach, Beethoven, etc never composed in equal temperament (and essentially any composer before the late nineteenth century) and yet people assume that they did, and that we arrived at a "better" tuning system. It drives me crazy when there are all sorts of exotic scales and modes from around the world in an app, and they are all in equal temperament. It's just such a crude approximation.
..on the other hand, the very fact that young musicians don't have to build instruments from animal guts and felled trees, that they can jump right in to making music, allows for possibility exploring realms that are hard to imagine. an open source approach as it were. like when the music concrete explorers of early 1940's realized they could make very rich music using the new capture medium of tape or wire, they tapped into something that an orchestra could never touch and predicted a future of electronic music. The fact that some new synth makers (and open source synths such as Synth One) are integrating microtonality as more than just an afterthought give me great hope that tuning will matter again. Hopefully they add full scala support so that young people have easy access to explore music in deeper ways (and without having to reinvent the wheel).
TLDR
The discussion of modal music without a broader context of history and of tuning (such as truly answering the question of what a mode IS, and more broadly, what a scale is... and just how truly arbitrary they are) is, to me, nonsensical.
agreed, we need to try better or real trolls will come. Big nasty trolls! 🤮
And thank you for the suggestion. I sometimes need a push lately to want to play guitar. I've let it languish for about six months for other reasons, and I'm trying to find a spark that will energize me back into it. I feel like I'm getting close.
I'm not liking the way I ran through those E modes though because I did it by cycle of 5ths so its somewhat difficult to hear the difference between each form, since they are only one note different per form as I progress, but I guess that's standard transposition, so probably a logical way to practice it.
Don't we all. There are many here that will be encouraging. I'd love to hear more actual realtime guitar on this Forum. I use "ToneStack Go" for Guitar Amp/FX but also bought all the others over the years.
Send us another contribution.
Well, I wanted some controversy, but not the kind that appeared. Just good natured, information seeking and gathering, and respectful interchange in a discussion about modal music. If you look at the first post you will see my original questions which I stated without any added opinion. When that did not attract the attention I thought the subject deserved I changed
the title to something more controversial and added some thoughts that people could respond to with their sometimes greater knowledge and insight.
@palm, you are marvelously schooled and undoubtedly skilled on modal playing. I learned a lot. Why you think I am a Luddite I am not so sure. After all I am as engrossed (though not as skilled or talented) as most here on the forum, I believe. I spend at least eight hours a day trying to learn from this forum and develop some rudimentary understanding of this technology. No I did not cut down a Sitka spruce to build my own soundboard, but when I wanted an electric organ at age fifteen there wasn't much out there that a kid could afford (unlike today, despite the bitching over app prices). And the best someone out of college with no dough could do to record music was save up for a teac two track, and, though I did not gut a cat to string my homemade violin, I did suffer from years of frustration to get to a place where I could make music that might be counted as jazz. Hey, it is not poor pitiful me. I had a blast, it was the sixties and I loved every minute of it, and I had a great teacher. I feel sorry for the kids of today (please don't lambast me now for showing some concern) there lives are way harder and more complicated. It is just that the tools for music making are available for pennies and the technology lifts all boats in a rising tide. Kids can play something that sounds good out of the box if they are using technology and not trying to get a sound out of a trumpet.
I knew I would take some heat for voicing my opinions on this subject, but if you read the last paragraph of my opening post:
"I know I will take some hits for this. Let me preempt some. It is great for people to discover music making without years of misery to get there. Some people on this forum are masters of the modal form and their music is creative, sometimes boundary breaking and a joy to listen to. Ambient music is another category altogether, easier to make, perhaps, but difficult to make something that stands out from the crowd. And there are masters of that form here as well, I love modal music. I just want to hear how other minds perceive its place in the scheme of things."
As a character on SNL used to say, "Is that so wrong?" Or do we just hear what we want to hear and as a famous forum poster once said "have a knee jerk reaction"?
When people like @palm and other knowledgeable souls are brought into the discussion it is worth catching a little flack. I think we all have learned a great deal from everyone participating, at every level, and with every point of view. This forum allows free speech without fear of reprisal or ridicule
(Unless one does not conform to mutual respect for the fair play of ideas). Would you have it any other way?
Hey now, it's your turn!
Just kidding of course.
However I'm seriously trying to make myself do a 6-hour challenge this week to try and force myself to work on a track for 6 hours straight and then post what I end up with.
It won't be based on the modal frame though.
I'm out of time today, but it is coming soonish.
I'll make a thread out of it at the time and hopefully others will join in.
Some trolls have both friends and enemies. They feed them equally. Certainly an art form for some trolls.
@[Deleted User], are we talking Shrek like trolls, or trolling robots, or Russian trolls? I am still trying to figure out mimes.
mmmm... I guess shrek like trolls, trolling robots sound sort of cool and I already have a couple of Russian Trolls on the street corner from my house. 🤮
haha, thanks for responding. No, I didn't mean to accuse you of being a luddite, it was more the overall tone of the thread that prompted a response from me, not so much to original post.
the main point I wanted to make is that it seems we tend to fixate on the narrow field of modal music as it existed in the mid twentieth century up to the present. Modal jazz is not even really modal in the strict sense. It almost always deviates from the mode and almost always modulates to another key. I think it was just a natural pendulum swing away from the insanity of bebop (I love bebop and hard bop etc, but it is insane music) and twelve tone/serial music. In the paradigm of twelve tone equal temperament, these advancements were merely trying to push on the boundaries of that tonality. Whereas unequal temperaments and non-tempered music has completely different sets of boundaries to work from.
Also, let's not forget that in the early days of Jazz, it was nearly synonymous with pop music for several decades. Satchmo, Ellington, Basie, etc were household names. The beboppers were the freaks making weird, underground, avant garde music (such as at minton's playhouse, in the wee hours of the night) and arguably derailed Jazz from the mainstream for better or worse. proto free jazzers - the shape of jazz to come!
I suspect that modal jazz was sort of a way to direct the music back to something that non-musicians (the audience) could sink their teeth into once again. but if we zoom back in, this is all ancient history. The adoption of sampling technology and sequencers into mainstream music, not to mention the ever rising prominence of the DJ ever since the 70's. And now the ability to create a drag-and-drop "hit" with no musical training whatsoever, there's no doubt we've entered some strange musical territory. While I work to tediously create sounds from the ground up, trying and failing again and again, only to see my young nephew put together a track in garage band that sounds sort of like generic music, informed by other music that uses the same sort of drag and drop templates, I'm reminded that we're attempting completely different things, and that we've entered strange territory. it could be construed as sort of a journey v destination thing... As it becomes easier to bang out tunes, I can only hope that the pendulum swings again into the other, wilder direction of a music that rewards experimentation and risk.. but for the most part, I see people playing it pretty safe.
I'm hopeful though.. there's often an underground of music that isn't really grasped by the general public (as with polyphony, bebop, footwork, and so many bold forms that have sprung up) for decades or even centuries.
and so I'm less worried about the problem of the limited scale palette that most new musical instruments promote, and more worried about the general deficit of attention, a global apathy that is taking hold even as (and perhaps because) we have access to such a wealth of information. I feel it every day. That as we are inundated with a barrage of information, all we can do is skim it, and still not scratch the surface.. and google supplants our need to actually understand information (how many arguments these days in "looking it up" for some definitive answer. a blessing and a curse!
(perhaps this is my own ADD shaping my worldview, but I can't help but see it getting more pronounced on a societal level all the time)
Great post.
The only bit in the OP I took issue with. Maybe because my first thought was "YEAH! Pop radio is depressingly lacking in difficulty. It's all as smooth as the best smoothie you've ever tasted and they're constantly making it smoother and smoother, smothered in it's own banal smoothness."
Then I remembered. This is classic get-of-my-lawn syndrome. For context, I have more hair in my ears than I do on the back of my head. However old we are, when we were kids, pop music was not difficult. Even great pop music. Elvis -> Monkeys -> Bay City Rollers -> Madonna -> NSync... I give up at the 00s and the rest were out of a hat.
I mean, could Pat Boone or Rosemary Clooney or Kenny Loggins or Celene Dion etc be any more smothered in their banal smoothness? Sure, at least some of them had pipes but so does Adele or Bruno Mars or CeeLo, etc.
Yow, this banter is not at all what I'm used to in this forum. Instead of making opposite points you have personal insults thrown about intelligence and musical knowledge.
For something different but still a take on modern music vs. slightly older popular music, I offer this from Rick Beato called "has every song been written?":
Looking at you, Thumbjam! Although in all fairness, at least Thumbjam allows you to tune your notes, unlike the majority of apps.
Even sadder is that in India a lot of the classical musicians are playing with harmoniums and not really learning the important tuning differences between ragas.
Yes! So glad thumbjam and geoshred have included microtonal capabilities.
@palm I'd never heard of Forqueray . Great piece!
yes! only recently came to hear these gamba suites. Couldn't find the one I was looking for, but there's all kinds of chromatic movement and very strange and unexpected melodic and harmonic turns. So beautiful!
Do you know Gibbons?
👌the silence at the end of that piece was wonderful, I was satisfied.
Music is pitch, dynamics, duration and tone. Freedom in music is the ability to emphasize one or more of those characteriscs. Genres tend to be blocked in certain ways of thinking music. That’s not bad. Western music is mostly pitch oriented, electronic music is a lot based on sound textures and rhythmic transe, for example.
Modal music is different from tonal music in the way music is thinked. To me, tensions/releases in tonal music is made by note position relatively to chords notes, and to chords progressions which give some colors to notes. Modal jazz tensions/releases are inside the scale, each degree has a relationship to others degrees. If you play this note, it will tend to lead you to play this other note. This is a colorful language in iself too. Indians learn ragas during years, and each degree has its own name. Resonant body like human voice, horns, strings all have natural overtones. This is why Bartok scale is considered the most natural, but this is also why pentatonic scale is so universal: first natural overtones. People all around the world just listen to what’s inside the sound. It seems that there are some physical rules in music, this is a tangible phenomenon we can’t flex by thought. But human being interact with that sound and create lot of ways for its own feelings expression and communicate them.
John Coltrane was deeply involved in modal jazz after its tonal period. He was studying ragas, oriental and african music. When you listen to its latest works, you can hear lot of stuff in its scales. Modal playing is another way to create and resolve tension, out of scale playing is plainly possible too, by using other modes as there is no real tonality.
yes, but to be honest I'm not really a fan of Gould. I'm not a purist, but I think early music rarely sounds as good on piano as it does the instruments (and tunings) it was written for.
this is an example of what I was getting at in an earlier comment. about the importance of tunings. Just listen to the wonderful un-equal temperament of the Gibbons piece perfomed by Leonhardt. Those pure thirds! The powerful resolutions are lost by using an equal tempered piano, and the color is blurred and less vivid to my ears. (I realize it's not the same piece btw - I hope I'm not coming off as rude, merely sharing my opinions)
Beautiful performances; thanks for the links. Do you know WA Mathieu's book "Harmonic Experience"? He describes how harmony derives from JI, even in 12et contexts.