Mode (music) - WikiHQ

In music theory, the term mode or modus is used in a number of distinct senses, depending on context.

Its most common use may be described as a type of musical scale coupled with a set of characteristic melodic and harmonic behaviors. It is applied to major and minor keys as well as the seven diatonic modes (including the former as Ionian and Aeolian) which are defined by their starting note or tonic. (Olivier Messiaen's modes of limited transposition are strictly a scale type.) Related to the diatonic modes are the eight church modes or Gregorian modes, in which authentic and plagal forms of scales are distinguished by ambitus and tenor or reciting tone. Although both diatonic and Gregorian modes borrow terminology from ancient Greece, the Greek tonoi do not otherwise resemble their medieval/modern counterparts.

Previously, in the Middle Ages the term modus was used to describe intervals, individual notes, and rhythms (see ). Modal rhythm was an essential feature of the modal notation system of the Notre-Dame school at the turn of the 12th century. In the mensural notation that emerged later, modus specifies the subdivision of the longa.

Outside of Western classical music, "mode" is sometimes used to embrace similar concepts such as Octoechos, maqam, pathet etc. (see below).

Mode as a general concept

Regarding the concept of mode as applied to pitch relationships generally, in 2001 Harold S. Powers proposed that "mode" has "a twofold sense", denoting either a "particularized scale" or a "generalized tune", or both:

In 1792, Sir Willam Jones applied the term "mode" to the music of "the Persians and the Hindoos". As early as 1271, Amerus applied the concept to cantilenis organicis (lit. "organic songs", most probably meaning "polyphony"). It is still heavily used with regard to Western polyphony before the onset of the common practice period, as for example "modale Mehrstimmigkeit" by Carl Dahlhaus or "Alte Tonarten" of the 16th and 17th centuries found by Bernhard Meier.

The word encompasses several additional meanings. Authors from the 9th century until the early 18th century (e.g., Guido of Arezzo) sometimes employed the Latin modus for interval, or for qualities of individual notes. In the theory of late-medieval mensural polyphony (e.g., Franco of Cologne), modus is a rhythmic relationship between long and short values or a pattern made from them; in mensural music most often theorists applied it to division of longa into 3 or 2 breves.

Modes and scales

A musical scale is a series of pitches in a distinct order.

The concept of "mode" in Western music theory has three successive stages: in Gregorian chant theory, in Renaissance polyphonic theory, and in tonal harmonic music of the common practice period. In all three contexts, "mode" incorporates the idea of the diatonic scale, but differs from it by also involving an element of melody type. This concerns particular repertories of short musical figures or groups of tones within a certain scale so that, depending on the point of view, mode takes on the meaning of either a "particularized scale" or a "generalized tune". Modern musicological practice has extended the concept of mode to earlier musical systems, such as those of Ancient Greek music, Jewish cantillation, and the Byzantine system of octoechoi, as well as to other non-Western types of music.

By the early 19th century, the word "mode" had taken on an additional meaning, in reference to the difference between major and minor keys, specified as "major mode" and "minor mode". At the same time, composers were beginning to conceive "modality" as something outside of the major/minor system that could be used to evoke religious feelings or to suggest folk-music idioms.

Greek modes

Early Greek treatises describe three interrelated concepts that are related to the later, medieval idea of "mode": (1) scales (or "systems"), (2) tonos – pl. tonoi – (the more usual term used in medieval theory for what later came to be called "mode"), and (3) harmonia (harmony) – pl. harmoniai – this third term subsuming the corresponding tonoi but not necessarily the converse.

Greek scales

The Greek scales in the Aristoxenian tradition were:

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| Aristoxenian scale || rough modern pitch || Aristoxenus' description