"local Modes" As A Path To Truly-Exciting Melodies

[MikeRobinson]

While it's true that I did not grow-up Catholic, I did rather have an early piano teacher who was a bit of a Mother Superior type.  I've never quite forgiven her for those times when she (gently) slapped my wrists, lifted my hands and put them back "in the right place" on the C-scale.

 

She was, for some reason, very put-off that my six-year old self liked to play songs like "Merrily We Roll Along" with my hands positioned on the keyboard right-next to "Middle C."  She simply concluded that what I was doing was "wrong."  She couldn't know that I was hearing a different sound, seven very-different sounds in fact, and liking them, even though I really didn't understand what I had heard.

 

Well, forty-five years later I now know that I was hearing modes, even though I did not know it at the time.

 

Try it yourself.  Play "Merrily," using all-white keys, but don't start with the usual "E."  You have seven other white-keys to choose from, and remember:  play only "white keys."  If you start with "C"," for example, you will hear a sound that seems to be very minor, as in fact it is.  If you start with "D," it sounds either "very exotic" or "very out-of-tune," or maybe a little of both.  Starting with "G," on the other hand, three notes up from usual, sounds "very familiar yet very different."

 

Well, I promise not to bore you with Latin things like:  Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, ... bah.  Nor even: "I Don't Pet Little Monkeys After Lunch."  If you ever take a college course, you can memorize such things (for a few weeks).  Never mind:  there are seven of them, and they are all shifts along the "all white keys."  And this is why they work.

 

"Theoretically speaking," every major scale consists of a certain pattern of "whole steps" (there's a black-key in the way ...) and "half steps" (there isn't).  And, if you start with "Middle C" and play "all the whites," you can see what that sequence is:  "Whole Whole Half, Whole Whole Whole Half."  (The "half" is at position #3, between E and F, and again at position #7, between B and back-to C.)  Every major scale (and there are twelve of them in all), is just like that.  And, each one of them has seven distinct modes, which are simply dictated by: "where you start" ... a particular song, or, a particular phrase.

 

"Hold on to your hats, folks," because this is where I'm going to point-out a little something that you've been staring-at for as long as you've been staring-at a piano keyboard, but that you might never have thought-of in quite this way before.

 

"Every song," you see, consists of individual phrases.  The phrases are a mixture of contrast and similarity with the other phrases (if this is to be an interesting song, that is).  But each phrase "begins somewhere," "ends somewhere else," and "covers a certain territory of musical ground" in-between.  Well, as your ear listens to the entire song, it so happens that your perception of what's going on is sort-of divided.  On the one hand, you maintain a clear sense of "the overall key of 'the song itself.'"  But on the other hand, you also hear each phrase as a distinct section, especially if that section clearly includes the interval of a fifth ("C-d=2-e=3-f=4-G ...") or its "a fifth going the other way" cousin, the fourth.  When this happens, your ear hears that particular phrase as being "in" one of the seven modes that are available for the key.

 

If you "just fool-around with Merrily, playing this one-hand melody starting at each of the seven white-keys that it can start on (and playing only "white keys"), you will hear for yourself how each of these starting positions ("modes") has a very different flavor, tone, and mood.  This gives you a palette of different mood(e)s that you can evoke in the different phrases of your "simple" (sic ...) melodies.

 

Try it!

[arteg]

Lydian was my favorite, something from space movies.

Edited November 10, 2014 by arteg