Mode (music)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mode in music is one of the most ancient and persistently misunderstood concepts in all of Western theory. Plato believed that changing the musical modes of a state would cause a wide-scale social revolution. That claim sounds extraordinary, but it was made in complete seriousness, and for centuries it was treated as settled wisdom. The word "mode" itself carries at least four distinct histories inside it: the Greek harmonia, the medieval church tone, the Renaissance polyphonic system, and the modern diatonic scale. Each of those histories borrowed, misread, or deliberately repurposed the ones before it. How did a single term accumulate so many different meanings? And why does the Locrian mode, one of the seven modern modes, remain "traditionally considered theoretical rather than practical" even today? Those questions trace a path from ancient Athenian philosophy through 9th-century monasteries to Irish fiddle tunes in County Clare.

• 2. Greek Roots

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  The Greek theorist Aristoxenus described a set of scales named after peoples and regions: the Dorians, the Lydians, the Phrygians, the Locrians, the Aeolians. These names were drawn from cultural subgroups of ancient Greece, small regions in central Greece, and certain Anatolian peoples who were not ethnically Greek but lived in close contact with them. Aristoxenus himself was critical of how earlier theorists, whom he called the Harmonicists, applied these ethnic names. He argued that their diagrams, exhibiting twenty-eight consecutive quarter-tones, were "devoid of any musical reality since more than two quarter-tones are never heard in succession."

  Beyond the scales themselves, Greek theory dealt with three interrelated concepts: scales (or systems), tonoi, and harmoniai. The word tonos was used in four senses: as note, interval, region of the voice, and pitch. Cleonides attributed thirteen tonoi to Aristoxenus, representing a progressive transposition of the entire scale system by semitone across the span of an octave. Ptolemy, in his Harmonics, took a different view, presenting all seven octave species within a single fixed octave by using chromatic inflection, which is broadly comparable to the modern practice of building all seven modal scales on a single tonic. In Ptolemy's system there are only seven tonoi rather than thirteen.

  The harmonia was not simply a scale. In the earliest surviving writings, it was described as the epitome of a stylised singing characteristic of a particular district or occupation. When the late-6th-century poet Lasus of Hermione referred to the Aeolian harmonia, he was more likely thinking of a melodic style characteristic of Greeks speaking the Aeolic dialect than of a fixed scale pattern. It was only around the year 400 BC that a group of theorists known as the Harmonicists attempted to bring these regional harmoniai into a single system. The most prominent of them was Eratocles, whose ideas survive only at second hand through Aristoxenus; he represented the harmoniai as cyclic reorderings of a given series of intervals within the octave, and confined his descriptions exclusively to the enharmonic genus.

• 3. Music, Mood, and Morality

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  Plato, writing in the Republic, used harmonia to encompass not just a scale but a range, a register, characteristic rhythmic patterns, and textual subject matter all at once. He argued that soldiers should listen to music in the Dorian or Phrygian harmoniai to be hardened, but should avoid the Lydian, Mixolydian, and Ionian for fear of being softened. The philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle, composed around 350 BC, include extended sections describing how different harmoniai affect mood and character formation.

  Aristotle's testimony in the Politics is remarkably specific. He wrote that the Mixolydian moves listeners to grief and anxiety, relaxed harmoniai produce mellowness of mind, the Dorian generates moderation and firmness, and the Phrygian creates ecstatic excitement. He concluded: "From all this it is clear that music is capable of creating a particular quality of character in the soul, and if it can do that, it is plain that it should be made use of, and that the young should be educated in it." The Greek word ethos in this context means moral character, and this entire tradition is known as ethos theory.

  This belief in the direct moral power of musical modes did not vanish with antiquity. Medieval and Renaissance scholars produced detailed tables listing the character each mode was said to convey. Guido of Arezzo, writing around 995-1050, characterized the Dorian as serious, the Hypodorian as sad, the Phrygian as mystic, and the Lydian as happy. Juan de Espinosa Medrano, writing in 1632-1688, called the Phrygian inciting to anger and the Lydian simply happy, while the Hypodorian had become serious and tearful. These tables mapped the same modes to different emotional qualities across centuries, which is itself evidence of how loosely the concept was held.

• 4. The Church Modes Take Shape

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  The oldest medieval treatise on modes is Musica disciplina by Aurelian of Reome, dating from around 850. Hermannus Contractus was the first to define modes as partitionings of the octave. The earliest Western source actually using the system of eight modes, however, is the Tonary of St Riquier, dated to between roughly 795 and 800. Tonaries, which are lists of chant titles grouped by mode, appear in western sources around the turn of the 9th century.

  The eight-fold division of the Latin modal system, arranged in a four-by-two matrix, was of Eastern origin, probably from Syria or even Jerusalem. It was transmitted from Byzantine sources to Carolingian practice during the 8th century. The influence of works by Saints John of Damascus, who died in 749, and Cosmas of Maiouma, coming from Jerusalem and Damascus, is still not fully understood.

  Each of the eight Gregorian modes is built around two structural pitches: the final, which functions as a resting point, and the reciting tone (also called the tenor, from the Latin tenere, meaning "to hold"). In authentic modes the reciting tone begins a fifth above the final; in plagal modes it sits a third above. The reciting tones of modes 3, 4, and 8 shifted upward by one step during the 10th and 11th centuries, with modes 3 and 8 moving from B to C and mode 4 moving from G to A.

  The 6th-century scholar Boethius had translated Greek music treatises by Nicomachus and Ptolemy into Latin, but later authors created confusion by applying his descriptions to explain plainchant modes, which were an entirely different system. The treatise of Hucbald synthesized three previously separate strands of modal theory: chant theory, the Byzantine oktōēchos, and Boethius's account of Hellenistic theory. Carl Dahlhaus later identified the three essential factors that grounded modal theory: the relation of modal formulas to the diatonic scale, the partitioning of the octave into a modal framework, and the function of the modal final as a relational center.

• 5. Expansion and Conflict

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  In 1547, the Swiss theorist Henricus Glareanus published the Dodecachordon, adding four modes to the traditional eight: the Aeolian (mode 9), Hypoaeolian (mode 10), Ionian (mode 11), and Hypoionian (mode 12). A little over a decade later, in 1558, the Italian Gioseffo Zarlino initially adopted Glareanus's system, but in 1571 and 1573 he revised the numbering and naming conventions in what he considered a more logical arrangement. The result was two conflicting systems circulating simultaneously.

  Zarlino's revision reassigned the six pairs of mode numbers to finals following the order of the natural hexachord, C through A, and transferred the Greek names accordingly. Modes 1 through 8 became C-authentic to F-plagal, under names from Dorian to Hypomixolydian. While Zarlino's system gained popularity in France, Italian composers preferred Glareanus's scheme because it preserved the traditional eight modes while expanding them. The one notable Italian exception was Luzzasco Luzzaschi, who used Zarlino's new numbering.

  The confusion compounded in the late 18th and 19th centuries, when chant reformers associated with the Cecilian Movement, including editors of the Mechlin, Pustet-Ratisbon, and Rheims-Cambrai office books, renumbered the modes yet again. In their system the Ionian and Hypoionian on C became modes 13 and 14. Given this accumulated confusion, scholars today find it more consistent to use Roman numerals I through VIII for the traditional church modes, alongside the Latin ordinal terms protus, deuterus, tritus, and tetrardus, inherited from Carolingian treatises.

• 6. The Seven Modern Modes

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  Modern Western modes share the same notes as the major scale but start from each of its seven degrees in turn, producing a different sequence of whole steps and half steps from each starting point. Ionian, built from the first degree, is the major scale itself. Aeolian, built from the sixth, is the natural minor scale. These two modes are the foundations of most Western tonal music.

  The remaining five modes each carry a distinctive interval that sets them apart. Dorian's raised sixth degree, compared to the natural minor scale, gives it a particular color that makes it common in both modal jazz and traditional folk music. Phrygian's minor second degree, the lowest possible opening step, produces a sound strongly associated with flamenco, though Phrygian music frequently raises the third and seventh degrees by a semitone. Lydian's augmented fourth degree is its sole departure from the major scale. Mixolydian lowers only the seventh, making the seventh degree a whole tone below the tonic rather than a leading-tone a semitone below, which gives it the character common in Irish traditional music and blues. Locrian, built from the seventh degree, is the only mode whose tonic triad is diminished rather than major or minor. Because diminished triads are not consonant, they cannot serve cadential endings under traditional practice, and Locrian has historically been treated as theoretical rather than playable.

  The seven modes can be ordered along the circle of fifths in a sequence where each mode has exactly one more lowered interval relative to the tonic than the mode before it, taking Lydian as the starting point. Irish traditional music draws heavily on Mixolydian and Dorian modes alongside major and minor. The tunes most commonly cluster in a handful of key groups: G-Major/A-Dorian/D-Mixolydian/E-Aeolian and D-Major/E-Dorian/A-Mixolydian/B-Aeolian. In the west-central coast area of counties Galway and Clare, flat keys are far more prevalent, with C-Major/D-Dorian/G-Mixolydian and F-Major/G-Dorian/C-Mixolydian as the primary groupings.

• 7. Modality Beyond the West

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  The concept of mode extends well beyond European music. The source identifies direct analogues across multiple traditions: the maqam in Arabic, Turkish, and Azerbaijani music; cantillation in Jewish music; the echos system in Byzantine music; dastgah in Persian traditional music; raga in Indian classical music; thaat in North Indian or Hindustani music; pathet in Javanese gamelan music; and the ancient Tamil pann system, which connects to the South Indian melakarta system. In 1792, Sir William Jones applied the term mode to the music of what he called the Persians and the Hindoos, and as early as 1271 Amerus applied the concept to cantilenis organicis, most probably meaning polyphony.

  Within Western music after the common practice period, the conception of modality shifted further. Jim Samson notes that any comparison of medieval and modern modality must account for the fact that modern modality takes place against a background of roughly three centuries of harmonic tonality, which creates a dialogue between modal and diatonic procedure rather than a simple replacement of one by the other. When 19th-century composers revived modal writing, they rendered the modes more strictly than Renaissance composers had, to keep their qualities distinct from the prevailing major-minor system. Renaissance composers had routinely sharpened leading tones at cadences and lowered the fourth in the Lydian mode without treating these adjustments as violations.

  Zoltan Kodaly, Gustav Holst, and Manuel de Falla used modal elements as modifications against a diatonic background, while Claude Debussy and Bela Bartok went further, allowing modality to replace diatonic tonality outright. In modern music theory the word mode is also applied to scales derived from rotations of the ascending melodic minor scale, the harmonic minor scale, the harmonic major scale, and the double harmonic scale, each generating its own set of seven modes with names such as Lydian augmented, acoustic, half-diminished, and altered. Karlheinz Stockhausen defined modal construction as what results when steps are removed from an equal-step scale, a definition that locates mode as a principle of selection rather than a fixed system of names.