key, mode, melody
the stuff at the beginning of song posts, defined...
Here is the first of several posts in which I will provide an overview of the information at the beginning of each song post. Eventually, there will be posts about these concepts in depth.
Key, Mode, Melody
After the recordings, I list "key," "mode," and "melody." These three things are all related; they have to do with the pitches used in the song. Key and mode are often used interchangeably. In classical music pedagogy, key often refers only to major and minor pitch sets ("major key" or "minor key") and any other combinations thereof are modes. Edwin Gordon proposes that modes are the pitch sets and their tonics (home or resting tone) — after all, major and (natural) minor are the same pitch sets, but with different tonics. Key, for Gordon, is the specific pitch that is the tonic. Gordon writes that there is, for example, one major mode with 12 "keyalities," that is, transpositions of the same pitch relationships. What I put at the "key" heading is the tonic pitch ( = the letter name of the pitch) and the name of the mode: C major, F blues, E dorian, and so on.
Under mode, I list the pitch set that makes up that mode in the "keyality"1 the recording is in:
C major: C D E F G A B F blues: F G Ab Bb B C Eb E dorian: E F# G A B C# D
This pitch set is the basis, the pitch ingredients if you will, for the song. Sometimes the melody does not use all the pitches in the mode. Sometimes the chords do not use all the pitches in the mode. Sometimes the melody or the chords may "borrow" or include other pitches that are not in the mode. We have not yet (as of this writing) listened to any songs that borrow chords, but we definitely have had melodies that do.
Under melody, I list the pitches that are used in the melody in a stepwise/scale-like order from lowest to highest. Instead of using letter names for the pitches, however, I use solfege syllables. Solfege was designed by Guido d'Arezzo in Italy around the year 1000. It is very possible he was influenced by similar pedagogical creations coming out of Turkey, Persia, and Arabic lands.2 Guido took a Latin hymn that everyone knew, whose phrases began on the pitches of one of the standard modes of the time. Each phrase began on the subsequent pitch, so in the same way that modern people might remember the interval of a tritone is the same as the opening of the Simpsons Theme or "Maria" from West Side Story, Guido's choir members could use the syllables at the beginning of each phrase from the hymn coupled with places on the hand as a mnemonic device to audiate the mode they were using. This system was "moveable" — it wasn't about the specific pitches, it was about the relationship between/among the pitches. As we mentioned above, this parses with Gordon's point about how the mode is the set of relationships, regardless of the absolute pitches (the letter names) it uses.3
I use this system for describing the pitches of the melody so that it's easier to find the absolute pitches you may need on your instrument if you are playing a transposing instrument, and/or if you try to play along with one of the other recordings in a different key. I use just the first letter of each syllable, unless it's borrowed (e.g. s = so, si is so#) or as in the case of the blues or true classical minor diatonic to the scale.4 Capitalization and apostrophes show the range:
d = do in the middle S = the sol below do s = the sol above do d' = the do an octave higher
Someone else might hear /do do'/ as /DO do/ and that's fine. It's all relative.
I also use la-based minor, re-based dorian, and so forth, instead of do-is-always-the-tonic (a common pedagogical stance) because I agree with Gordon that we do not perceive all pitch relationships as a modification of the major scale. That said, the blues and freygish definitely throw a bit of a wrench into all of this, but we do what we can with what we have.
The key I pick for the song recording is mainly because it uses open chords for ukulele (there have been exceptions). Then at the end of the post, I provide alternate recordings based on a) whether it's an interesting version, and b) whether it's in a different key. Part of the point of having different keys is that when you are a beginner, some keys are easier, some harder. This is why we practice them. This is primarily an issue for wind instruments, but it does create different combinations of movements for all instruments. So if you are, say, a clarinetist learning to improvise, two chord songs in the key of E (any mode) is physically nice and easy for guitar, but physically more complicated for clarinet, who would have an easier time with songs in F or Bb (both of which are physically more difficult for guitar).
I'll end with a brief discussion of "scale." Most of the time, scale is synonymous with mode: it's the set of pitches used in a piece of music (or the set implied — as we've already mentioned, sometimes not all the pitches are used) put in stepwise order beginning with the tonic. In a very strict Classical sense, scales are major and minor — everything else is a mode. Yes, this sounds a lot like what I said at the beginning about key and mode! So let's differentiate it this way: Scale is the stepwise set and can be used interchangeably with mode. But we also say that the mode is the "flavor" and the scale is the set removed from context. Key is, as Gordon describes it, the transposition. But as you know, the way we talk about music casually and the way we talk about it formally often differs. It's good to be able to code switch.
I have always found keyality to be an awkward and ugly term which is why I keep putting it in scare quotes, but it gets the point across, so here we are.
A funny thing happened, however: In Italy and other Romance-language lands, the solfege syllables became the pitch names, so that what the north-of-the-Alps countries called C, was permanently called "do."