>| ... 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.
I tend to do that if I'm speaking loosely. I take "major" and "minor"
to refer to the third of the scale, or more precisely to whether I
use major or minor chords for the accompaniment. So ionian, mixolydian
and lydian modes are all "major", while aeolian, dorian and the
harmonic minor scales are all "minor".
>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.
>
I have one, and the next version of BarFly will be able to tell you
what mode to use in the K: field. Don't have time to write about it
now, but I'll post another message later.
Phil Taylor
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