Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
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Musical Modes, Part 1 (Church Modes)
Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
This is the first of three blogs on musical modes. Part 1 is about “church” modes, Part 2 is
about rhythmic modes, and Part 3 is about non-European modes.
A mode is a kind of “do-re-me” experience, like a modern musical scale. Modern scales are
based on what are called church modes (because they were used in church music). Before
there were pianos and organs, a note’s relationship to any other note was somewhat
changeable. There were stringed instruments (like the harp, psaltery, and lyre) whose tuning
could be changed in a matter of moments or even accidentally, and flutes, whose tuning was
entirely dependent upon hole placement and the length of the instrument, and was super
easy to get wrong.
Before the 10
th
century, music was learned by memory because there wasn’t notation, and
presumably, melodies changed and mutated with each individual who tried to learn and with
every skilled performer who messed with it a little for the pleasure of it. Patterns emerged.
Then, as now, people enjoyed recognizing familiar elements and the patterns began to be
expected. In modern music, this is still true, with cadences and a certain pattern of chords
that indicate that the end is approaching. Ever notice that people sing along when it’s
familiar? That’s exactly what I mean.
You might think of modes like punctuation. Certain sounds, just like at the end of a sentence
or question, indicate something specific to the listener. This is also true with melodies. As
music evolved, certain patterns were thought of as pleasing and were re-used and re-
formulated; these patterns and their elements became the modes.
The specific modes were not really a concept until the 10
th
century when exact pitch notation
and the Guidonian system (you can read more about this on my blog entry The Guido’s Hand
Seminar ) came into being in Europe. This meant that a song started on the same pitch every
time it was sung rather than adapting it to whatever pitch suited the singer’s comfort. But
once modes were invented as they tried to document the existing chants, they found that the
majority of the chants fit into the new theoretical system of modes. How wonderfully
convenient!
In the end, modes are easy enough to define in modern terms: modes are a species of notes
in an octave series distinguished by the placement of half and whole steps—in other words, if
you moved do-re-mi around on the piano, always playing eight notes in a row, and only
playing the white notes, you could play each of the eight modes.
Just for contrast, later music, such as that from the Classical or Romantic eras, uses only two
modes, major and minor. One modern scale is formed the same way as another, with the
half steps (the black keys on the piano) in identical places, no matter which note it starts on.
Depending on how you look at it, modern scales are way simpler (because there are only two
of them) and way more complicated (because you have to memorize which notes are part of
which scale or where the half-steps are). Each church mode has a distinctive sound to it,
unlike modern scales where, unless you have perfect pitch, one major scale sounds much like
any other.
There are two forms of modes: authentic and plagal. These names come from the four
original modes Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian and a near relative of each,
beginning a fourth lower and using the same series of notes called Hypodorian,
Hypophrygian, Hypolydian, and Hypomixolydian. In the middle of the 16
th
century, mode
placement and transposition created four new modes: Ionian and Hyperionian (ending on C),
and Aeolian and Hyperaeolian (ending on A). Ionian sounds just like a C major scale, in case
you were wondering, which is the usual do-re-me arrangement.
Modes were not regarded as repeatable from octave to octave, like a modern scale is. A single
octave of the mode represents the normal range for a melody in that mode. Stretching
beyond the octave was simply not done. Authentic modes seldom have melodies that drop
below the starting note (or the final note) by more than a single step; plagal modes can
wander further below and a step above the octave.
In the 10
th
century, as theorists tried to formulate a strategy, they found that they could relate
their discoveries into the Greek system of modes as described by Boethius and later Latin
writers. That’s why the modes have Greek names, although nothing else about them is Greek.
(It is humorous to note that the names were misapplied, but that’s a subject for another day.)
In the first half of the 12
th
century, the Cistercians amended some of the chants to make them
fit into the new modal system. The Cistercians, a particularly severe and fundamentalist order
of Catholicism (Bernard of Clairvaux was a founding member), took a biblical passage literally
and deigned that no music should extend beyond the ten strings of a psaltery. To do this,
they had to transpose some chants or parts of chants.
As scholars tried to fit existing chant into the parameters of the nascent notation system, they
struggled with getting the notes and intervals to sound the same. This was because they
hadn’t invented those black keys on the piano—the sharps and flats. Music was written
without accidentals other than the occasional B-flat. Even well past Bach’s time in the 18
th
century, B-flat was considered the ”devil’s note” and its use was restricted in the extreme. For
instance, you could only have a B-flat on the way up a scale. B had to return to its natural
state on the way back down. At any rate, the only accidental in Medieval times was a B-flat, so
they had to move some chants around, squeezing them by force, in order to get them into
the modes once they’d established what those were.
Before the invention of the staff, identifying the mode didn’t matter. The correct intervals
were applied wherever they were sung within a singer’s range—the starting note, as you and I
know it, simply didn’t matter. Once the lines of the staff (eventually) forced the invention of
absolute pitches (where a C is always a C), elements like a singer’s range, the placement of
accidentals, and whether a chant was joyful or sad became relevant.
Establishing the modes freed composers from centonization, which just means using an
existing melody to create a new song. Prior to music notation, melodic themes made it
possible to learn a wide variety of chants by rote memorization. You only had to learn the
new words and stick them into the familiar melody. After the staff’s invention, there were
more options and new melodies were created with wild abandon. Okay, maybe not wild
abandon, but with the full freedom that having an outline provides.
After notation was invented and the modes were put into common practice, chants were
constructed so that the third and fifth notes were emphasized in addition to the first note of
the mode. Phrases begin and end on these notes more than on any others. This is
foreshadowing for the more modern chord.
Okay, so that’s church modes in a nutshell. Next up, rhythmic modes.
Sources:
Early Medieval Music Up to 1300, edited by Dom Anselm Hughes, Oxford University Press,
London, 1954
A History of Western Music (8
th
edition), J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, Claude V. Palisca,
W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010
Medieval Music, Richard H. Hoppin, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1978