Hearing modes

[nineofkings]

I often have trouble hearing the modes in non-drone based modal music. Renaissance music, notably, sometimes ends up sounding a bit like a piece in a major key with a lot of emphasis on some other chord at the end. Is this just inevitable in a world full of tonal music? How does one write modal music for a modern Western audience in a way that they can "get it?"

[jancivil]

Well, the music in the pre-tonal period wouldn't tend to be mistaken for tonality. There is a point where the musica ficta 'lydian' or 'Mode of F' really is so close to what we receive as 'Ionian' (which is a look back by 'theorists' rather than actually a thing) you may as well say it, so... In 'Modal Counterpoint' the rules develop bringing it all closer and closer to 'major/minor paradigm'. If you mean like John Dowland, well that's tonal music afaict.

I was doing modal back early in my musical life on a guitar, it became a focus for me but I liked a drone. Or the low E tuned down to D anyway. My modal focus recently has been melody and rhythm and not much to speak of otherwise. I have one thing which is G Phrygian, but there's an argument to be made that it's a disguised C Aeolian. However C as a tonic never occurred. My old musical partner-in-crime likened it to Keith Jarret.

There is an easily identifiable problem if one is entrained to tonality and in tonal contexts the all the time reliance on chords, in that one simply must be careful of a dominant tendency; ie., V7 or vii becoming de facto too easily just thru their appearance*. Modal melody is served best by staying with very few chords if any at all. Dorian, well you can do i to IV, IV harmonizing the character tone which is a raised sixth compared with 'minor' unaltered. *: Now, you can do IV7 if you know what you're doing and have that modal ear but let's say Gm to C, C7 is fatally attracted to F when that's your whole wheelhouse, you know. edit, IE: it's ii V7 I in F now.
You could go cuter and do VII (F major in G Dorian) additionally if that really makes the thing move, I mean if that's the basic idea. I find that many is doing too much, personally.

Mixolydian, I and 'bVII' over and over again 'til you die. Like that, you know.

Now there are other things you can do bypassing the usual chord thinking as well.
Coming up with the 'harmonic' interest just writing lines.

Frank Zappa's Black Page #2, many if not most of the lines derive from a Lydian scale as per the chord at the time. And the chords are '2 chords', ie., there is no third, it's root/M2/5.

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I didn't grow up in classical music and I didn't know how that harmony worked really before I developed some distinct preferences and ear. I don't really like that outside of Bach and some of late Beethoven quartets. Mozart sacred choral music works on me but it transcends what anyone else had managed IME. I learned jazz chordal thinking early enough but I was none too swift as to the kind of thinking for lines in it. Because of the modal predisposition I suppose. I gravitated more to music with a ground that doesn't move much, Indian Classical Music spoke to me the most.

But the notion of seven chords as the default fabric really has to go to get out of that problem.

[cturner]

Well, as Harold Powers asked: “Is Mode Real?”

[JumpingJackFlash]

Renaissance music, notably, sometimes ends up sounding a bit like a piece in a major key with a lot of emphasis on some other chord at the end. Is this just inevitable in a world full of tonal music?

Well, with a lot of effort, it may be possible to train oneself to hear (and/or appreciate) such music in a more modal way, but the short answer is yes, for most people brought up with Western tonal music today, this is inevitable.

In a nutshell, music back then worked very differently and people didn't think about it in the same way we do now.
People tend to latch onto familiar-sounding elements and interpret them in a way that makes sense to them, but this is going to be very different from how people of the past would have heard and thought about music.

This is a big topic though and there are hundreds of books devoted to it.
In the past, some analysts (notably Shenkerians) have tried to impose a tonal framework onto early music, but doing do is ahistorical and anachronistic at best and leads to such statements as "this work is in a minor key but ends on the dominant". This is the cart pulling the horse and I believe does a disservice to such music.

[jancivil]

Well, for a modern person 'mode' may be a broader term than pre-tonal Roman Catholic Church practices. I may be missing it if Nine wants to place 'that sound' somehow for a modern audience.
It's a very archaic sound.

Some of more common music in modern day music which sold is 'modal' and not tonal.
I can't know just how entrained you is, Nine, from the one post. JJF has stated he finds ICM very alien for example.

[JumpingJackFlash]

It should be stressed that there is a world of difference between the "modal music" of the Renaissance (as the OP mentioned and which I was previously talking about), and other types of music which might be considered modal such as jazz and music from certain non-Western cultures.

For that matter, there is also a huge difference between modal music of the 13th century and modal music of the 16th. (Just as there is a difference between "tonal music" of the 17th century and tonal music of the 20th).

[nineofkings]

It should be stressed that there is a world of difference between the "modal music" of the Renaissance (as the OP mentioned and which I was previously talking about), and other types of music which might be considered modal such as jazz and music from certain non-Western cultures.

I think this is where the confusion is happening. In most non-Western modal music there's a drone, and in early modal jazz at least there are long stretches of vamping on the same sonorities. So hearing the modes there isn't really a problem because it's the overwhelming single sonority that's happening at any given time.

But in early Western music there's full independent polyphony within the modes, which read as chords to any listener born in the last 300 years. So for my purposes I'm focusing on early Western music with this question. It seems like a lot of post-tonal music that uses weird scales, and a lot of contemporary jazz, has returned to a modal way of thinking. So there must be some kind of lesson to learn from the roots of that style of music in the West, yeah? But when I listen to these early music pieces, it sounds more like "tonal music with very weird harmonic choices," or in other words the center tends to drift.

Take this for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXQuOQccCWA

The first few bars sound solidly like D dorian. It's centered on D, cool. But halfway through the section there's a G sharp, and it suddenly sounds unshakably like it's in A until the last bar or two. So what makes Dorian sound cool in jazz and in film scores, but sound like A minor in choral music? Can we apply this thinking to modern music without having to use some weird 20th-century scale, or is it a lost cause, as jancivil suggests?

[JumpingJackFlash]

... So what makes Dorian sound cool in jazz and in film scores, but sound like A minor in choral music? Can we apply this thinking to modern music without having to use some weird 20th-century scale, or is it a lost cause, as jancivil suggests?

I think the issue here is that modality (and tonality) isn't just a set of notes or a formula for composing. It's a way of thinking.

There are many examples of "pre-tonal" music which sound to us to be in the major or minor key, perhaps with some unusual elements here and there, but if you try hard enough, some such pieces can be analysed entirely as being major or minor - that is, tonal. Now, there is the "if it quacks like a duck..." argument, but you can't really say that such music is major or minor because those terms didn't yet exist. Nobody at the time thought in that way.

Once we get into "post-tonal" music though, things are different because major/minor tonality is a known thing, something that can be recognised and, to a listener, can very easily overpower any modal elements which may be present. As such, when modern composers want a modal sound (or just to avoid a tonal sound), they have to overcompensate slightly and make a conscious effort to avoid tonal clichés (the most obvious being the V-I progression).

To take an exaggerated example, you can claim your piece of music is in the "Ionian mode" using the white notes centred on C... But if you start having G7-C progressions all over the place, it's always going to sound to Western people today like it's in C major. The only way to avoid this with such a work would be travel back in time to before the concept of "C major" existed and play it to an early Renaissance audience... It would probably raise a few eyebrows but (for people sufficiently versed in music theory anyway) it would be perceived as modal (Lydian or Mixolydian) because they would know no other context for interpreting it.

[jancivil]

The first few bars sound solidly like D dorian. It's centered on D, cool. But halfway through the section there's a G sharp, and it suddenly sounds unshakably like it's in A until the last bar or two. So what makes Dorian sound cool in jazz and in film scores, but sound like A minor in choral music? Can we apply this thinking to modern music without having to use some weird 20th-century scale, or is it a lost cause, as jancivil suggests?

Well... the thinking is kind of strange for us. You said you think in chords like anybody born in the last 3 centuries. There was a time where there was no such thing, at least to the people involved with that music.
I'm no musicologist... I'm unaware of anything other than the Church music that was solidly codified. ICM was not written down, there's basically rumor and beliefs handed down orally.

One way to this would appear to be Fux Gradus Ad Parnassum. Like, do all that stuff by the book. There's the basic thinking codified in rules.

When that goes to A, it's 'mode of A' with a leading tone. Palestrina is an interesting case particularly, residing right there when the ficta was forming tonal concepts; so there is a sort of innovative thrust there (late 16th century). But confer Fux for Palestrina particularly.

[jancivil]

At any rate, I think it's a very worthwhile area to get into. If you can get free of chords. Free of the confinement of blocks, free from names of a totally limited object, defined and contained by one little idea strictly [thirds] and into the vertical aspect as a result of lines... to me this is where the action is.
You can do it! The drone can shift. There doesn't have to be a scale-thing. Nothing is true, everything is permitted kinda deal.