For instance, let's stay with Dorian. It's a minor mode [min. 3] with a major sixth and a minor seventh.fmr wrote: ↑Thu Jan 03, 2019 11:03 amNo it isn't. That's the mistake you (and countless others) always do.
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As Jancivil wrote several times, it's not enough to play the white keys starting in a different note to have "a mode". You will most likely only have a scale played in whatever tonality you are in but over a different chord. In the end, you remain tonal, and you have no resemblance of the mode you "think" you are, whatsoever.
Modes were not used as "scales" (you will not see a single "scale" played in modal music), and you will never establish a mode by simply playing the "scale". The way to state the mode is through its polar notes (which vary from mode to mode, BTW), and characteristic interval sequences (since you didn't have the harmony to establish it).
D Dorian, F and B are our primary identifiers for its character.
F and B are also strong indicators of C Major harmonically; so it's definitely not enough to merely point to 'starts with D', even if there is a notion of D as 1 implied in your clause there.
It's a linear consideration. I mean the character notes are considered in a melodic aspect, a linear way of operating. There isn't really a "harmonically" in modal thought.
So we treat, eg., B in a certain way. This can be ruined by lack of awareness/lack of care. F E cannot be perceived as 4-3, B C cannot be perceived as 7-8. And there are so many ways this will happen. If you glom chords as if 'here's all seven triads' just as in C Major onto this purported D Dorian, for example. You wind up with a harmony or an implicit harmony containing F and B and Dorian vanishes, if you have no modi operandi for bringing out the character of Dorian.
It's beyond the scope of such a thread to be instructive enough here, I think.
