The Lydian Scale/Mode

A friend on Facebook posted a link to this explanation of the Lydian scale, and it's very well done. With the simple graphics and musical examples it does a great job of getting across the feel of a scale that's neither major or minor, the two scales we sort of mostly settled into around the time equal temperament came in during the 18th century.

Since at least Plato, there's been the feeling that different modes elicit different mental/emotional states in people. Before equal temperament came in (which makes it much easier to modulate from key to key) the different modes had a stronger flavor due to the more pure tunings used (e.g. C# and Db weren't the same pitch as they are today). The examples here, though, show that they still have a feeling different from either major or minor.

Understand Music

This video just popped up on Boing Boing.


And they recently linked to an iPad app that looks interesting.

V.S. Key Signature

The next step is choosing a key signature (pitch set) to work with. Since the harp likes flats, since I'm contemplating an alto flute part (which adds a flat in transposition), and since strings might be involved (I think of them as having a slight preference for sharps), that narrows it down to one or two flats, three at the most (on the alto, four is my practical limit).

One flat would yield F major, which from the F above middle C to the one above that nicely covers the ambit of flute pitches in that mid range I want to really dig into having Susan's tone freshly in mind. The two octaves of D minor above middle C would probably incorporate the full gamut of pitches to use to avoid overpowering the harp.

Adding the other flat would yield G minor, which is a nice one step up from F major, and having just played around a little with it on the keyboard*, those two keys are where I'm going to start, as I think moving from one to the other can make for a pleasing and fresh sounding shift.

There are, of course, possible modal uses of those key signatures as well, and "modal" is a comment I sometimes hear about my music, so I must be doing something along those lines some of the time.

* Should say I simply can't imagine composing music without access to a keyboard. I took piano lessons as a child but never "got" what classical music was about until I heard Susan and a flute friend playing the Bach Two Part Inventions at a garden party out in the Virginia countryside early on during our time at Shenandoah. What did happen during all those years of lessons, though, was that the physical arrangement of the keyboard became the way I thought and still think about music and music theory. I do not have "theory mind", but with a keyboard and plenty of time, I can fake it.

Composing Music

Over the years I've often had people tell me they can't imagine how it is someone can go about composing music. It happened again here a few days ago when I was on a quick visit to my flute playing friend Susan up in Vermont and I got to socialize with some artists. In a wonderful conversation with a very accomplished and well established engraver, he said something along the lines of he could see how visual artists got going on a piece and worked it to completion, but where a composer even started was a mystery to him. His being an amateur player in a community symphony orchestra made the comment more striking.

I think part of what creates this wonderment is that very few people know the basic ingredients of music. In English classes you learn spelling and grammar and then build on that knowledge to understand literature. If English classes were like music classes, you'd be taught all the fine points of recitation of great literature without ever getting that grounding in the basics of how it's put together. 

The other thing that seems to daunt people about composing is seeing it all as one fell swoop, when it's actually a series of steps where various decisions about how to go forward are made. So I've got this idea of blogging the composition of a piece of music to see if that will help illuminate the process, at least as far as how I go about it. May well jinx the piece, but seems worth trying. It's working title will be Vermont Song and posts talking about it will begin with the abbreviation V.S.

This may help as well trying to figure out how to present some aspects of theory in a non-threatening way. I'm more and more convinced some familiarity with theory needs to be part of the learning materials from the get go. Having that knowledge baked in from the beginning seems to be a better route than trying to add it on after drilling technique and nothing else for years on end.

Theory Mind

Back in this post I talked about Martin Gardiner's idea of multiple intelligences and mentioned my idea that "theory mind" is one type of musical intelligence. It can manifest in a left brain way as a natural understanding of the inherent structure of music along with the ability to use the sometimes very complex language that has arisen over the centuries to describe that structure. The right brain manifestation is naturally feeling the chord changes and the way all the pitches fit together vertically and horizontally, along with the ability to "get" complex rhythms right away.

The problem is how to present this information to those players for whom talk of music theory comes across as somewhere on a spectrum from scary to obtuse. I think one problem has been that most explanations of theory are written by people with theory mind, and they see the whole of it all at once, and for those of us who don't, the result can be nearly impenetrable. 

The challenge in creating appropriate learning materials is to choose the best few things to get across first so as to form one or two beachheads of understanding and then build out from there, always connecting the information to music the player is playing. Every piece of music in the player's book should have the basic structure of the piece laid out in as close as possible to everyday language, either nearby or in an accompanying book.