> I used to think that modal composition was primarily found in "celtic" > music. However since I started exploring other traditional genres of > music, I'm finding modes to be very common in everything except Western > European Art music.
Art music always used modal systems until about 1600; there was a sharp drop in their use between Bach's time and the late 19th century, but composers picked up on folk modality in a big way again around 1900 (e.g. Sibelius) and now people like Steve Reich use modality to a more obsessional extent than anybody in the folk world. And any composer quoting a chant melody (i.e. anybody writing religious music) had to deal with its modal character whatever their own style might have been like. For me, Mahler's way of blending Wagnerian-chromatic art music with central European modal folk works a damn sight better than Corrina Hewat's attempts to create Scottish-trad cool jazz. Jazzers are the people who *really* don't get it. Coincidentally I've just been listening to "Blumen-Strauss", a set of organ suites from around 1700 by J.C.F. Fischer. There's one suite for each of the eight church modes (each suite with several movements; together with another set of pieces in all keys, the CD has 89 tracks for 78 minutes of music. Is this a record?) So even as long after the Renaissance as that, the idea of doing modes systematically was still seen as a challenge. It's just about impossible to tell where Fischer is quoting church music, where he's using Czech folk music and where he just made it up. BTW, anybody know where Schubert got the main theme for the Quartettsatz in C minor? - it's very similar to "Highland Harry" but as far as I know he had no contact with the Scottish-music-arrangement business. >> American country music spends a lot of time in the "Major" pentatonic >> and dorian modes. > Doesn't American country music have Irish and Scottish roots via > immigration to the Appalachian region? And English roots. Breandan Breathnach has some numbers on this: he found no difference between the relative frequency of modes in English, Irish and Scottish tunes. The best documentation of this stuff is for songs rather than instrumental music - see Bronson's "The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads", for example. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files and CD-ROMs of Scottish music. ----> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "scots-l" at this site, please <---- Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
