For
as long as there has been music, there have
been persons worried about its ability to
influence behavior. The ancient Greeks were
convinced, anecdotally, that a certain king
had been stirred to arms by the sound of a
flute playing a tune in the Phrygian
mode. Plato was certain that the
mixolydian mode would make young men
"effeminate."
So what were
these modes that had such power over men?
We don't know
for sure what each mode sounded like in its
native environment. Very little Greek music
survives, and it is mostly fragments. Among
the surviving documents there is a great
deal more writing about the nature of music
than the music itself. One of the
ancient Greek's preoccupations had to do
with the patterns of notes used to create a
melody. These modes might be
considered roughly equivalent to the major
and minor scales that young musicians
struggle to master today. From
about 1600 until the start of the twentieth
century the modes disappeared from our
musical lexicon, so that only patterns of
major
and
minor
were considered acceptable to western ears.
But there was a time before that when Europe
took an interest in these relics of ancient
Greece.
During the later Middle Ages the writings of
men like Plato and Aristotle, so long
forgotten when Rome fell, were rediscovered,
which led to a renewed interest in modes. It
now appears that the theorists of that day
got all of the Greek modes mixed up, but
here is how they have come down to us.
There are
seven:
Ionian,
Dorian,
Phrygian,
Lydian,
Mixolydian,
Aeolian,
and
Lochrian.
To give a
sense of what the choice of mode can do for
a piece, let's take a familiar tune that is
just old enough that it probably was
originally a modal tune. It has become a
popular Christmas Carol, and comes to us
from England, in the 16th century, which was
just about the time that the modes were
starting to lose their appeal--but they
weren't finished just yet. The tune is
Greensleeves, and here is what it
would sound like in the
Dorian
Mode.
Since more
modern ears found that too alien, the tune
has been translated into our more modern minor.
Some notes have been changed to fit,
particularly the ones at the end, so that
there is a greater lean toward the
keynote, something we've all gotten used to
for the past 300 years.
However, the
battle is not over. Very often, one will
hear a
combination
of both Dorian and minor mode, keeping the
strongest elements of the minor key we are
so accustomed to, but preserving that "wild"
high note in the first part.
Plato would
not have been amused.
Mixing,
matching, and borrowing from one mode in the
middle of a piece which seems principally
composed in another represented an impure
conjunction of moods and states of mind that
ought to be kept separate, he warned.
In passing, let us note that he would not
have enjoyed the music of Schubert, who
liked to write melodies filled with such
joyous grief that seem to be in both major
and minor at once, or the modal flights of
the ambiguous Brahms.
Tragedy was
one thing, he opined. Comedy was another.
And never should they be mixed together. But
of course, artists have been doing that for
centuries, and, thanks to folks like Plato,
every time they do it, they are heralded as
great innovators! People like Shakespeare,
who call for comic characters to play
clowning scenes in between scenes of great
drama to relieve the tension and let us
laugh for a moment before the next round of
bad news. Even fellows like Polonius, the
clown (for all intents and purposes) in
Hamlet, who manage to wander into the midst
of the drama and get themselves killed after
having said so many ridiculous things in the
course of the play that made us laugh.
It is hard, though, for a thing
to maintain its identity when it is
mixed with so many other things, and
Plato was sure that every mode had a
particular characteristic, and that it
was not appropriate to put elements of
one kind of mode into another.
For
example, if the Phrygian mode led us
to sober contemplation, it would not
be right to play a Phrygian tune
"quickly and with chopped notes."
A
Dorian tune should always have a
military sound about it; perhaps
those dotted notes that make up so
many official tunes in our own day.
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But it was not
enough simply to regulate the modes; Plato
wanted to limit them. In his book (ten
books, actually) Republic, Plato manages to
argue away most of the modes. He wanted
strong and courageous leaders, and any music
that promoted weakness, or intemperance, was
not a mode for him. Dirge-like modes, like
the Lydian mode, are out, as is the Ionian,
for it promotes sloth and drunkenness, he
feels. One has to be amused: the Ionian mode
is the one that, according to Middle Age
theorists, sounds exactly like our modern
day C major scale! So if you've been feeling
slothful lately, blame it on half the music
you've been listening to!
And so he
settled on just two: the Dorian and
the Phrygian. The Dorian, he said, would
"fittingly imitate the utterances and
accents of a brave man who is engaged in
warfare," while the Phrygian was
suitable "for a man engaged in works of
peace."
What led him
to these conclusions is unknown. It is
likely that some kind of tradition had grown
up in the artistic community that led them
to associate certain modes with certain
styles of music. In our modern era,
composers often feel that different keys
express different moods. And there are more
practical considerations; for instance, a
man writing a military symphony would want
to use trumpets and drums. For much of the
18th century, trumpets did not have valves
and could only play certain notes. If you
wanted to use trumpets you pretty much had
to write your piece in D major. In
consequence, that key became associated with
official sounding, courtly, or battle,
music. If Plato had been born into the 18th
century, he probably would have picked up on
this tradition, and assumed that D major was
a noble, courageous, key, suitable for
leading troops into battle. Since music
written in that key was often in celebration
of the king or his prowess, it would have
seemed to back up his claim.
There were modes, and then there were
modes. As has been mentioned, certain ones
were cause for alarm. It was not the
excessive volume or the lyrics that young
people had to be guarded against, it was the
construction of the melody itself. Certain
tunes in our own day may seem to
actually sound more "immoral", partly
because of a web of associations we've all
gotten used to (think of all the movies
you've seen where the saxophone begins to
play a slithery tune at the least hint
of innuendo...), and certain conventions
have grown up about how the music should
sound to accompany certain emotions (...or
those breathless passages in the low bass of
the piano that always signify a chase scene
in an action movie). Romantic pieces
have their own vocabulary, as do moments of
great tension and anxiety. We may not have
any idea how to write a film score, but we
certainly know what kind of music to expect
in each of the pivotal moments. Those more
mundane bits in the middle require no music
at all; it is only when we should share some
strong emotion with the onscreen characters.
We still expect music to provide an
emotional content, and we expect that it
will move us in some way.
In our own
day, various musical "artists" have been
held in contempt for the kind of music that
they are feeding our youth; Plato's alarm,
in some regard, looks like an early attempt
to protect against the pernicious influence
that immersion in some kinds of music may
have on them. But Plato's idealism went a
good deal farther. He envisioned a just and
equitable city-state, with all of the
elements acting together to produce wise and
honorable and brave citizenry. Music,
he argued, was one of the forces that should
bring about that end.
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