On 8/12/06, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Fri, 11 Aug 2006, Chuckk Hubbard wrote:
It's easy to work a Bb into a theme in C without giving too much away.
Indeed, often the VII is not played much, and until it is played at all, you can't distinguish between a ionian and a mixolydian. If a melody is supposedly in C ionian but doesn't contain a VII then you consider it as being C mixolydian and it wouldn't make much of a difference.
That said, I'd like to say that mixolydian modes are extremely common, and arguably more common than ionian ones nowadays! as a proof, think that a 7th chord defaults to mixolydian, and you have to call it "major 7th" for it to mean ionian.
There's a girl studying composition here who writes kind of new-agey piano-voice stuff, maybe a la Tori Amos, definitely a la some anime themes, and we were chatting once (my motivation was not strictly musical) when she said, "I really like to write mixolydian, I just feel like that's my mode." What do you say to that? "My apartment seems very mixolydian"?
Since folks are brainstorming on musical structures, I recall reading something in a book about Bartok, about an idea he tried to use. Expanding on the idea of a tritone substitution, he built a "key" made from the circle of 5ths, where you would use 4 keys, minor thirds apart, and then every root of a chord would be either tonic, dominant, or subdominant of one of those 4. For some reason he had two major keys a tritone apart, and then at the minor thirds between them, minor keys. I think his idea was to arbitrarily substitute tonic for tonic, dominant for dominant, subdominant for subdominant. E.g.:
F C G C could become F F# G C, or Abm F# Em(or E7) C and so on. I think a jazz theory teacher somewhere used to mention third substitution too. That would be a simple way to take things outside the usual electronica. I don't know if it would always sound good, but hey, Jimi Hendrix didn't always sound good.
-Chuckk
"A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians." -Frank Zappa