Modal Interchange Demystified

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On the Diversity of Musical Production

I was taught music backwards. Like many that toil in the living room after homework at an upright piano I ran my fingers up and down the scale and arpeggios that were photocopied from a book and sent home with me. Tuck in your thumb when you’re not using it. Try with both hands now. While a necessary finger exercise and aid to muscle-memory these scales were also the foundation of all the music I would be plinking through in my journey to becoming a semi-skilled pianist.

I had no real desire to play the piano at that age. I started piano lessons quite young after a mercifully brief stint with the violin; a mercy more likely bestowed on my parents than on me. For me guitar was where it was at. I dreamed of a shiny red axe. I would rock out all amped up just like that hair bands of the day. It wasn’t until three years after the conception of this desire that my mother trotted me down to the basement music school of the local instrument shop. I was presented with a guitar that she bought (a nylon-string classical) and sent in for my first lesson. Like all first music lessons the half-hour was spent showing me where a few of the notes were on the neck, and a discussion of what I wanted to learn. Visions of rock stardom still danced in my 12 year old mind and I answered that I want to play Rock and Roll sir. “Well then,” replied the teacher, “we must first teach you the Blues.” This is when I learned of pentatonic scales.

Scales are one of those things we can’t run away from when learning to play an instrument. They are the basis for the flavour of a song. They tell you what notes are allowed and what notes are not. Remarkably no one ever mentioned to me where they come from, how they are formed, and are there alternatives? We have thousands of years of musical experimentation and growth that has been documented. In learning to play I was deposited on a single outer branch of a complex tree and have been crawling my way back to the trunk ever since in order to explore and understand other types of musical traditions.

Much of the popular music that one hears today is known as “tonal music”. Tonality is built upon the major and minor diatonic scales, and includes triadic harmony. The songs that currently dominate the aural landscape are written from this one system of musical production. If you want to play an instrument to reproduce what songs you hear on the radio, then tonal music is the place to start. This makes it the natural thing to teach little green musicians who are eager to hear a recognisable song emanate from their chosen instrument. Consequently when budding songwriters take up the craft, they tend to go on writing music in this vein. Only those who are pedantic, experimental, or untrained in musical theory may go on to discover the many other branches of musical systems.

Although so much music is written using these scales the major and minor scales are just one facet of the diatonic scale, which itself is a subset of the chromatic scale, which itself is only one of many other scales developed in the world. If you really want to play something immediately upon picking up and instrument then 12-tone music is the way to go, you will be guaranteed not to play a wrong note. To bad it’s not radio-friendly.

In trying to expand the variety of musical experience I wonder what the next big thing could be. Would the discovery of Church Modes by a talented and saleable new artist give rise to a new style of music that uses these un-tempered ratios? Gregorian chanting had a brief heyday some years back and has now incorporated itself into several genres, the folk music resurgence of the mid-twentieth century brought modal music back into the popular arena, progressive-rock borrowed structure from the common practice period to shake up the repetitive verse-chorus layout which so dominates song structure today, all of which shows that there is a place in modern music for older ideas and systems. In addition it shows that new forms can emerge through blending of musical systems. What would happen if we matched the Prometheus scale with the guidelines of counterpoint and the tempos of Speedcore? It boggles the mind.

Furthermore, with computers augmenting, and in some cases replacing, physical instruments the restraint of playing the prescribed frequencies of the system which that instrument is geared towards vanishes. The piano is unfettered from its tuning, allowing us to easily experiment with alternatives to what we are accustomed. Scales with completely hitherto unused interval patterns can emerge because the cost of experimentation (building and tuning an instrument) is eliminated.

I’d like to see the question of what music is, what constitutes a song, taught alongside the mechanics of whichever current musical system happens to be dominate. I don’t think that run-of-the-mill music teachers ever really tackle that question with their students, but rather teach them to play in the constraints of a system which defines the style of music favoured by the student, or the teacher, or the parent that pays for the lessons as the case may be. While one may teach within a framework, it is important to teach how that framework was derived and that there are alternatives that one might like to explore.

When I teach my children music, in addition to tonality, I want to give them a solid grounding in the foundations of music. If we strip a song of all the techniques and flourishes that add complexity, layers, and beauty to the craft of song-writing, we get music in its simplest form. We all start out that way; a child hammering out ‘Twinkle,Twinkle Little Star’ one laborious note at a time on the piano, the screech of ‘Polly-Wolly Doodle’ on the recorder, the hesitant plunk-plunk of ‘Red River Valley’ on the guitar. At the heart of it all is one frequency held for a time, followed by another one held for a time, followed by another and so on until the song is finished. Sometimes there’s a pause between the frequencies, sometimes there is not. I realise this all sounds very reductionist; I fail to mention that what frequencies are allowable is a very important component that separates a song from noise. Of the infinite set of frequencies that you could choose from, only a tiny fraction are heard by humans. A smaller fraction still may be produced by your instrument. Of the range that is producible only a fraction of these frequencies will be distinguishable from each other. Further still only certain ratios of one frequency to another will sound pleasant to us.

This amazing amount of unusable frequencies for a piece of music is what all musical systems intend to proscribe. Not only do these systems lay out rules of permissible notes but they include guidelines as to their use. For instance: Schoenberg’s 12-tone method suggests that each note in the chromatic scale is represented an equal amount of times in a piece. In math terms the distribution curve of notes in the piece is flat.

A scale is just an arbitrary way to divide the continuous gradient of frequencies between the tonic and the octave. The ratios that are chosen for the notes of a scale lend that scale a certain flavour. This flavour can be further restricted or modified by choosing arbitrary starting points in the scale for a tonic centre (modes) or introducing accidentals or augments, or altering the pattern of intervals that make up a scale.

Beyond restricting our choice of notes we may devise many other sorts of rules and guidelines regarding harmony, meter, rhythm, movement, etc. These rules are a way of directing how the selected frequencies are to be combined to make music. For example triadic harmony is the norm in the tonal system, but another system may favour quartal harmony while keeping the same scales. The possibilities quickly become endless considering the combinatorial nature of elements that make up a system.

This post is not meant to bemoan the primacy of teaching or producing tonal music. It is important that a musician learn it, for it is the system of music production that currently rules the roost, but will this always be so? Public tastes change, fashions change, tonal music may be something old fuddy-duddies listen to while the youth favour something we older folk would find quite bewildering. Considering the amount of people taking up an instrument today is by sheer numbers much greater than those in the past who had the ability to play, and given that we have the means to inexpensively record the music produced and broadcast it to nearly anyone, nearly anywhere, why should we not cover the gamut of musical experience? As listeners, we have a greater choice in musical styles to consume than ever before, and as musicians we have greater ability to produce novel forms than ever before. Teachers owe it to their students to at least mention from the onset of instruction that what the student is learning is just one of many ways to produce music and encourage them to explore others.