More About ‘Rules’
(entry for 11/1/24)
In the last post we talked about the ‘Rules of Bach’ that are so sadly mis-named, because J.S. Bach would have disowned them— if he had known about them! (They were invented in the late 1840s, whereas Bach died in 1750.)
Music Theory students (and teachers, even more so) seem to forget with alarming frequency the fact that all Bach was trying to do was sound good, make the harmonies complex, and give the singers interesting parts to sing and the instrumentalists interesting parts to play. That was it! ‘All she wrote,’ or, in this case, all he wrote! There were no rules, ‘of Bach’ or otherwise.
Part of this was the fault of an Austrian musician named Johann Joseph Fux, back in the 18th century. (And yes, it’s pronounced exactly the way you’re afraid it would be, though sometimes it’s spelled Fuchs.)
Johann Fux:
Though he thought of himself mostly as a composer, his most famous contribution to the musical world is not a composition at all, but a book he wrote, called Gradus ad Parnassum, in which he tries to explain a type of music written mostly in the 16th century, called Palestrinian Counterpoint, or sometimes just 16th Century Counterpoint.
Just as Mendelssohn’s students in Leipzig (see last week’s post: you can click HERE to do so), tried, after the fact, to impose a set of rules on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, who had died more than ninety years earlier, so Mr. Fux tried to impose rules, also after the fact, on a style of music championed by an Italian composer named Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, written two hundred years earlier. (In fact there’s some evidence, though no proof, that Fux’s theorems inspired the Leipzig ones. Why humans feel so much need to have ‘rules’ is another question.)
There are two things to know about the two sets of rules: 1. Fux’s ‘rules’ are much simpler than the Leipzig ones, and 2. The two kinds of music the rules try to explain are diametrically opposed to each other!
By the time of Bach, musical practice was in the process of settling on a type of music which we now call ‘harmonic,’ which means music intended primarily to please the ear at any given moment in time. This style is often referred to as ‘vertical,’ because the sounds that are occurring at any exact moment are arranged vertically on the page of music.
Palestrina wrote in a style called ‘contrapuntal,’ in which the relationship of each pitch to the note before it and the note after it is much more important than any worry about what the ear hears at any given moment. This approach is often referred to as ‘horizontal,’ because when you look at what is happening in the printed music, you are looking from left to right and vice versa.
(The example at the head of this post is written in modern notation, but would sound a lot like a 16th century contrapuntal sequence, ending it does on the most powerful interval, the perfect unison, as it's called.)
Of course, as listeners, we are always aware of both elements, the vertical and the horizontal. The difference between the two eras has to do with which element was at that time considered the more important of the two, if ‘push comes to shove,’ as we like to say. (In this case, perhaps it would be better to say, ‘if pitch comes to shove’!)
Giovanni Palestrina:
There is another huge difference between the music of Bach and Palestrina. Bach's sounds are contrapuntal and harmonic. Palestrina's sounds are contrapuntal and modal. There is a lot of confusion about this word ‘modal,’ so now might be a good time to clear some of this confusion up.
Way back about the year 600 BC, the Greeks had what they called Musical Modes. There were several varieties of these, given fanciful names related to various locations in the Hellenistic world. Different ‘modes’ were supposed to be connected somehow to these different places or to emotions associated with them. Unfortunately, we have no idea now what these Greek modes sounded like. The lyres they played on have long since lost their strings. Their flutes still have their finger holes of course, but they are not in pristine condition, so we don’t know precisely what they sounded like when they were new, and we don’t know what different sorts of flute scales were named with the different Mode names. So, basically, we’re clueless. Even pan pipes, which feature a different pitch for each pipe in the set, don’t tell us how they were played, or how the different sounds they produced were arranged into the Modes.
A lyre:
A Greek (aulos or syrinx) Flute:
Pan Pipes:
In any event, in the Middle Ages in western Europe, when musicians were trying to make some sense of the sounds they were making, they decided to use this idea of ‘Modes’ to describe the types of melodies they were composing. As there were only seven different pitches per octave at the time, rather than the twelve we have now, there were seven Mode names. For example, if you played from the note we now call ‘A’ [‘La’ in Latin-language countries like Italy] scale-wise up to the next note ‘A,’ the result was referred to as the Aeolian Mode. The notes were called, in Italy, La Si Ut Re Mi Fa Sol and back to La again. (Because it was hard to sing nicely on the syllable Ut, that was soon replaced with Do, which is a much nicer sound, and easier to sing to. Hence: Do Re Mi etc.) In Germany and other Teutonic-language countries, and in the British Isles, where the language was Anglo-Saxon and closely related to the Teutonic languages, the notes were called A B C D E F G and back to A again. (About three hundred years later Germany and Austria would replace B with H, as pointed out two posts ago. Click HERE to go there.)
Though they didn’t always keep exactly the same place names for their Modes that the Greeks had used, they kept the idea, and here are the names of the Modes they used, with the scales that are used in each mode:
Scale from A to A: Aeolian.
Scale from B to B: Locrian.
Scale from C to C: Ionian.
Scale from D to D: Dorian.
Scale from E to E: Phrygian.
Scale from F to F: Lydian.
Scale from G to G: Mixolydian.
And then, of course, back to Aeolian again.
There is/was no region in Greece, then or now, called Mixolydia, so it’s a bit of a mystery how they came up with that name for the G to G scale. But since the only instrument we still make that uses that Mode is the Mountain Dulcimer, we’ll let the question rest. (And I’m not putting the instrument ‘down.’ I have a very nice one myself. However, a word of caution, please, to players on that instrument. The correct pronunciation of your mode is Mix-oh-LID-ee-un, not, please, Mix-uh-LOAD-ee-un. Thank you!)
If you want to hear what the medieval modes sounded like, you can come pretty close to knowing by playing the ‘white notes’ on your piano. (The sounds aren’t exactly the same, but most ears aren’t good enough to tell the difference.) For example, if you play from D up to D, white notes only, no black notes, the sounds you hear are virtually the same as the Dorian Mode that medieval choirs sometimes sang in. Etc. (The difference between the sounds from your piano and the sounds that came from voices and instruments in the 1100s has mostly to do with the subject of Equal Temperament, which we will cover in a later post.)
(You can also play up the fretted scale on a Mountain Dulcimer that has no extra frets installed, and you will hear the Mixolydian mode, though in this case it will be from D to D or A to A, rather than from G to G, depending on which string you play the scale on.)
Locrian Mode was almost never used, because it has a terrible sound that makes our ears cringe, but the other six modes have survived (at times) to this day. Especially two of them: Aeolian and Ionian, and the second of those two way more than the first. We call those two today “Minor” and “Major.”
There’s a catch, though. For the equivalence between Ionian and Major, there’s no problem. They are identical. However, there are three different kinds of Minor Scales, the Natural, the Melodic, and the Harmonic. (We’ll get to the complexities of ‘minor’ in a later post.) Of these, only the Natural is the exact equivalent of the Aeolian Mode. But the vast majority of the minor-key musical compositions since Palestrina died use the Harmonic Minor scale.
When people nowadays veer off into Natural Minor for a bit, we say, “Oh, that passage sounds modal.” What we really mean is that it sounds Aeolian, because Natural Minor and the Aeolian Mode are the same thing, whereas Harmonic Minor has no equivalent Mode at all.
That’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about Modes, but since there’s a lot of misinformation floating around out there about that subject, at least you will know now what people are talking about when they use those words, and you’ll be able to have some idea when they say something that is not correct, and react accordingly (even if it’s just to keep your mouth shut and know better).
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