>> With gapped scales: Will a tune with a missing seventh >> be called ionian or mixolydian in the key+mode system? > Why should it be called either since it's not a heptatonic scale?
I suggested how we could deal with this years ago. There is no standard for putting this in key signatures, but Hungarian musicologists (at least; I think others follow their example) write the pitch set out explicitly along with the tune. The syntax I suggested for this in ABC was to write K:A Mixolydian -g for a seventh-gap scale, and allow staff-notation generators to translate that as a little circle on the staff line where the missing note is. And so on. A lot more readable than the Hungarian way of writing out the whole pitch-set in Guidonian sol-fa complete with overlaps. No obligation on staff-notation programs to pay attention to it every single time, of course. NB, this CAN'T be done automatically, since there will be accidental occurrences of gaps sometimes (particularly if someone quotes a tiny example, or a motif like the street cries on my CD which are often more gaps than notes). Put it in the signature and you know it's part of the structure of the tune. > [traditional English singers] got all the information they needed > from the notes of the tune. They could manage perfectly well without > being told the Greek name for it. To force their music into the > Renaissance modal system runs the risk of misrepresenting them just > as much as forcing it into the major/minor system. I can easily > imagine some academic saying "That's obviously meant to be Lydian but > they've got it wrong." The notes they actually sang or played (if we > have them) are the only certain truth. I think you are underestimating the cultural sophistication of English farmworkers by a VERY large margin. Nearly all of them went to church, and for most of the areas Sharp, Lloyd and Vaughan Williams collected in, that church was the Church of England. With a tradition of choral singing going back to Byrd, Tallis and Dunstable. Any really good singer could expect to be noticed by the church organist and dragooned into the choir, no matter if he spent Monday to Saturday digging ditches. So the *practice* of Renaissance modality was general public knowledge. A good singer is going to notice when similar phrases recur, even when the contexts are as different as a doxology and a patriotic naval ballad, and the recurrence is going to suggest using a similar intonation for both. So even in the absence of a theoretically explicit notion of octave species, the richer notion of mode as comprising a set of cadential formulae, and embracing both folk and liturgical music, would been hard to avoid. One place this happens the other way round is in shape-note singing - liturgical music driven by folk practice instead. But again the two genres are largely consistent in their intonation across the community. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ food intolerance data & recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts, and Scottish music To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
