[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I was pondering the fact that much of Joni's music is modal (and, so is
>what I write, as it turns out.) I also like Pierre Bensusan, and his music
>is modal with a capital M! I always though the modal nature of Joni's music
>came from her guitar tunings.
>
>Anyway, I got to thinking about scales, and how Western music uses the
>chromatic scale. I recall Joni mentioning in an early interview that she
>listened to Japanese kyoto scales. I don't quite hear that in Joni's early
>music, although I do hear it in Ellen McIlwaine who grew up in Japan. You
>can hear that influence in her music, although one would categorize her
>loosely as blues.
>Is there a good Web site that compares various scales?
Not sure of a web site but you might check out a book by
composer/musicologist/lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky: "Thesaurus of Musical
Scales." (By the way, Slonimsky also collected pejorative reviews of famous
musical masterpieces in "Lexicon of Musical Invective," an entertaining read
as well as a wonderful tonic for anyone who has ever been the subject of
critical slagging.)
Joni's earlier music (the first 8 studio albums, her major achievement, in my
view) is distinctly non-modal, references to "Japanese kyoto (sic) scales"
notwithstanding (and that should probably be "koto," the stringed Japanese
zither, cousin of the dulcimer, not the city "Kyoto").
In fact, her music is intriguingly and exceedingly chromatic ("Songs to Aging
Children"). Truly modal music is, by definition, harmonically static. Some of
Joni's tunes are somewhat modal, especially later work ("Sire of Sorrow") but
a big part of what thrills me about her earlier music (and the lack of which
disappoints in later stuff) is the wildly rich harmonic language of her own
invention, which has an intuitive logic apart from traditional harmonic
motion, and which boldly, almost capriciously (but never incoherently), moves
to unrelated tonal areas ("Banquet").
As her music shifted from song-like structures to later rectitative/linear
forms (especially from "Hejira" on) her harmonic range has narrowed and
flattened out, becoming, in effect, more modal. I sometimes wonder if this
development has left her unsatisfied and is partly the source of her
diminishing output, contrasting so starkly, as it does, with the riotously
colorful harmonic language of the American Songbook standards on the
orchestral "Both Sides Now" and the return to her own earlier songs.
-Fred
