Bryan Creer rambles on with:
| Of course nobody says "This is in F sharp, C sharp" rather than saying it's
| in D.
Actually, I have heard people say things like "Let's play it in two
sharps" occasionally, but I'd agree that this isn't common phrasing
in any crowd that I hang out with.
| ... there is a very strong pub music scene around here
| (East Sussex, England) and I could and, sometimes do, go to several sessions
| a week. Nobody EVER mentions modes. They just aren't part of our thinking
| and I'm talking about some very good musicians.
I'd wonder about this claim. My guess is that you're one of those
people who don't consider "major" and "minor" to be modes. But they
are, of course. I hear these two mode names fairly often. Of course,
people often say "major" for "mixolydian" and "minor" for "dorian",
but that's another issue.
This "major and minor aren't modes" misunderstanding is rather
common. Here in the USA, the term "modal" is often used, especially
by the Old-Timey and Bluegrass crowd, to refer to tunes that are
mixolydian or dorian, i.e., the tunes that use the major chord on the
low 7th in harmonies. This is sorta wierd terminology, of course,
since it implies that major and minor don't qualify as modes. But
what can ya do?
| I was, of course talking a load of twaddle about Scan Tester's No 2 to make a
| point, although I still think there is more to it than simple G major.
Probably the most interesting point is that, if you were to try to
write a routine that discovers the key (tonic+mode) of a piece, it
would be a good test piece. One of the standard rules is "Look at the
last note", but this fails for this tune. It's not an unusual
failure. Someone else has already pointed out that ending on the
dominant is fairly normal in many kinds of music. The British Isles
traditions also have a good number of "neverending" tunes that don't
cadence on the tonic at all, but just keep returning to the beginning
forever. The human ear hears this pretty easily, but an algorithm to
discover it isn't simple.
| World domination? Go for it! But you'll do better by being inclusive rather
| than exclusive. Get people on board with a sytem they understand and then
| teach them about modes.
Yup. I've found that one of the easiest way to start an explanation
of modes is to simply tell people that they already know two of them:
major and minor. Go into what makes these different, mostly the 3rd
of the scale. Then play a familiar tune such as Old Joe Clark or
Red-Haired Boy that is clearly "funny" in some sense. Explain that
this is actually a different mode, similar to major but not quite the
same. I've found that most people follow this explanation very
easily. Then you can quickly go into why some music sounds
"different", by explaining that it is simply using a different scale
that has its own logic, but one that they're not used to hearing.
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