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Kitchieboy's Music Tutor Learning to Read Music (But Not Enough to Hurt Your Playing) |
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Keys and ModesSo you've heard people talking about "modal tunes", or vaguely Greek sounding names like "dorian" and "mixolydian". Keys have to do, usually, with the the note a tune ends on, the key signature, and the mode. The modal stuff has to do with the intervals on a scale - the musical spaces between the notes - whether you could (if you wanted) stick in a sharp or a flat between adjacent lettered notes or not. It's easier to think of, for a given scale, as where you start and finish an octave. The intervals are built in, and sort themselves out. If it sounds a bit Greek, that's because some of this dates back as far as Pythagoras, the same ancient Greek that the Pythagorean Theorem is named after. (The square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.) Many historical figures famous for other things were also musicians: Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, King Henry VIII, Roman Emperor Nero, King David of Israel, and ..... Pythagoras. And remember, I said there was a long standing connection between music and math. We are working with 7 tone scales. One picture is worth a thousand words. So here is an illustration of the four most commonly used modes, using a G scale. The first staff just lists the notes in a G key signature from a low A below the staff to a high B above it. The next four staves show the notes of G Ionian, A Dorian, E Aeolian and D Mixolydian, with scales for those four modes inside the red boxes. |
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If you write in numbers for the notes, staying with "1" for G and counting up and to the right, you will see that A minor Dorian starts and ends on 2; E minor Aeolian starts and ends on 6; and D Mixolydian starts and ends on 5. You can use the same counting trick to check modes in other key signatures. Try printing the page and writing in the numbers. Here are two more common modal scales, this time with a C key signature. With this chart, we have room for two octaves of A minor Aeolian. |
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If you remember what we have hinted about key signatures, you will notice that G Mixolydian has a C key signature, and the Fs are natural, not sharp.
But what happens if there were no Fs at all - natural or sharp? Time for a side trip. Back | Side Trip to Pentatonic and Beyond | Next-Key Signatures Kitchieboy's Music Tutor - Learning to Read Music |
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