Ask an Artist: What Are Modes? by SJW Faculty Member Joe Gilman

Joe Gilman is a full-time professor at American River College. He has received Bachelor's degrees in Piano and Jazz Studies at Indiana University, a Master's degree in Jazz and the Contemporary Media from the Eastman School of Music, and a Doctoral degree in Education from the University of Sarasota. Joe has performed professionally with Eddie Harris, Bobby Hutcherson, Woody Shaw, Richie Cole, George Duke, Chris Botti and Slide Hampton, and has recorded with Joe Henderson and Jeff Watts. Joe recently won the 2004 Great American Jazz Piano Competition in Jacksonville, Florida and has twice been an International Jazz Ambassador through the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and USIA, traveling to West Africa in 1999 and East and Southern Africa in 2000.

Q: What are MODES? What is MODAL JAZZ?

This is a great question. In fact these are two great questions that call for two different though related answers. The answers are separated by as much as 1100 years of music history. And it will take two articles to answer, so here is part one!

First, what are modes? The answer to this question can really be taken from two different sources, the “Greek modes” and the “Church modes.”

The “Greek modes” date back to at least 350 B.C. and are a collection of musical tones (and melodic embellishments) that Plato believed had different emotional effects on the listener. These modes were named after Greek citizenry (Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians, and Locris) and regions of Asia Minor (Lydia and Phrygia). Plato even believed that the different arrangement of tones could make a person relaxed, sad, enthusiastic, inspired to work, or cause a social revolution! Pretty drastic stuff! He called this the “ethos of music.”

About 800 years later, the Europeans were using collections of pitches and began calling them “modes,” but the relationship to the old “Greek modes” is unclear. There were several misinterpretations and mistranslations along the way, yet the names of the modes stuck, even though the pitches and applications were different.

Although the church modes can be traced as far back as the 9th century, they became some solidified in the 16th century. Way back before there were saxophones, trombones, pianos, or even chords, time signatures, key signatures or accidentals, we had church modes.

Think of it this way. When you look at a piano, you see black keys and white keys. Imagine a piano with only white keys. The white keys have a repetitive ascending sequence of seven tones represented by the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. When you arrive at G, the sequence starts over again at A. Now imagine starting on the pitch D and playing all of the white notes ascending up to the next D. This arrangement is called the “Dorian” mode. Now imagine starting on the pitch E and playing all of the white tones ascending up to the next E. This is called the “Phrygian” mode. Similarly, from F to F is called the “Lydian” mode and from G to G is called “Mixolydian.” Although I said to imagine a piano, remember, these modes were created long before pianos, so we should understand that these modes were sung and played on early musical instruments. Also, they likely had a different tuning system than we have today, so the sound would have been significantly different than what we are familiar with.

These four modes were used by early musicians to create melodies, and were derived from usage in the church in the 6th century, where they created chant melodies for different parts of a Mass. They had different characters, ranging from serious and angelical to mystic and happy. It is interesting to note that there were variations of these modes called “Hypo” modes (Hypodorian, Hypophrygian, etc.), and emphasis on important tones within the modes, which made them either “Authentic” or “Plagal.” Remember, in the early days, there were no accidentals, no key signatures, no transpositions, and a very limited range, just the alphabet notes from D to D, or E to E, or F to F, or G to G (and the Hypos).

Along the way, in the 16th century, a Swiss monk named Henry said, “Hey! What about C, A, and B?” He decided that the B to B mode was pretty ugly and not worth the time to use for composition, but named the mode from C to C the “Ionian” mode, and the mode from A to A the “Aeolian” mode. Not too far down the line, in the 17th and 18th centuries, these last two modes became the favored sound by European composers (like J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel), and we started calling them the Major scale and Minor scale respectively. This group of composers found that you could start the major and minor scales on all of the tones; this was the beginning of being in a “key,” or “tonality.” Accidentals (sharps and flats) made their way in there too, starting with something called music ficta, but that’s another story.

The point is, once we got to major and minor keys and key signatures, most composers forgot about the old church modes like Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian, and it stayed that way for nearly 200 years! We’re talking Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms; most of our favorite classical composers. Only a few non-Germans, like Chopin and Liszt, occasionally retained the flavor of the old church modes. In the late 1800’s, a few maverick outsiders like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel became tired of the same old major and minor keys and the entrenched, seemingly unbreakable traditions recycled by the German Romantic composers, and decided to experiment with church modes again. Although the music they created was greatly criticized initially, this “Impressionistic” music became the biggest influence on American popular composers such as George Gershwin, jazz composers such as Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and jazz performers such as Willie “the Lion” Smith and Bix Beiderbecke. Their return to the use of modes was also utilized by twentieth century composers such as Vaughn Williams, Bartok, Kodaly, and Milhaud, and of course by jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

And that of course brings us to “Modal Jazz,” coming soon in part two!