Modes in ITM

[talasiga]

In Gillan's Apples we need to sort out out whether the D or the g is the last note.
If you put a G drone to the whole thing while you play it (in the olden modal manner)
you will (try it and see) get a Lydian feel and ending the melody at the D will just sound like a movement ending on the Lydian's perfect 5th. The drone will make all the intervals sound according Lydian.

This is not consistent with Irish Tradition. It is foreign to it. Maybe it goes back to a time when Roman Christian plainchant tradition disowned Lydian because of its devlish augmented (unperfect) 4th. Whatever! its not part of the ETHOS of Irish trad.

THEREFORE you D drone the piece and of course you get trusty ol D Ionian which is perfectly at ease with ITM ethos and there you have it.
Ending the piece with a G maj chord in accompaniment is in harmony with D because the D is the perfect 5th in G triad.

TBC

[talasiga]

If you accompany the end of the melody with a G chord you are potentially flagging
1. movement back to the first and very long note at the start of the piece.
2. movement to another tune in the set in G Ionian or a relative mode or gapped mode.

With "2", this, I speculate, would be likely to be a tune beginning with D, G or B.

This is yet another reason why assessing tunes on the basis of chord accompaniment is so arbitrary and therefore hardly core criteria.

[fiddlerwill]

Ahh Gentlemen, Surely this tune called here; Gillians Apples, is in D. Major? It ends on the Chord D, it contains the Chord A major and G major.
Jim Wards is also D major. What on earth makes anyone think it is in anything but D?

[talasiga]

Yes, if you see the ABC notation someone descibed the key as G major and people heard the Emperor's C thereafter!

[MTGuru]

Yes, if you see the ABC notation someone descibed the key as G major and people heard the Emperor's C thereafter!

So my variant above with C-sharps sounds right?

A good feint, but backwards. Labeling it Key of X doesn't determine tonality; it reflects perceived tonality. And those big honking G major melodic triads in the A part do count (though they alone don't disambiguate Major from Lydian).

[talasiga]

yes, musical imperialism wants everything expressed as black and white, as absolutes.
The colonised stress the relatives and there are usually heaps of them.
I am in the middle - absolute relatives.

Firstly MT, your "variation" is hardly traditional. You wouldn't do that playing along with someone else in a session, not without rehearsal. Maybe, but you'd be fluking it to fit in. Variations in this tradition in session is in the rhythmic ornamentation, and notes in the melody are varied by dropping them and certain ones that are already there being lengthened and not by addendum. Isn't that right? Hmm

Secondly, allowing your original variation with the natural C, that changes the tract we are using to exercise modal/key signautre analysis. And if we then analyse (oops, I just spelt that analise - freudian slip ) the tract with your variation we can then rightly talk of modulation because the piece is originally in D key signature and continues with that in section and you have introduced a modulation by changing the notes (in this case C# to C).

Thirdly, let us look at your attempted Trojan Horse variation with C#. Does it sound right?
That is a question calling in relative value judgement. Why wouldn't C# sound right (if musically used) in a tune which is in the key of D and already has C# in it?

TBC

[talasiga]

CONTINUED

W1
If C# sounds "wrong" it is because
1) you hear (or imagine) a G major chord accompanying that tract of the tune, AND
2) your musical acculturation associates G Major chord with the Ionian feeling.


C# will sound correct in, at least, these 2 situations (R1 and R2)
R1
C# sounds "right" because
1) you hear (or imagine) a G major chord accompanying that tract of the tune, AND
2) your musical acculturation allows you to hear other possible modes comprehended by the chord, namely Lydian, Mixolydian (in the limits of ITM)

R2
C# sounds "right" because
1) you hear (or imagine) a D drone (OR no accompaniment at all, including chordal) in the whole piece, AND
2) you hear the C# as just one of the club of notes that naturally occur in the diatonic scale of D major.

[benhall.1]

As Breatnach and every other authority on ITM have stated, and in accordance with the underlying theory - of all music, but specifically of that to do with Church modes, which is what ITM tunes are based on ... [takes breath] ... what happens to be the last note of any tune is completely irrelevant in determining the mode (or key) the tune is in. There is a note called a "final" in modal music. The word "final", however, confusing though it may be, does not imply the last note of a particular tune.

[If asked to find the reference in Breatnach, someone else provided it a long time ago on this site, I remember reading it in his and Henebry's writings, and I just can't be bothered to find it, before I'm asked. But since the concept is blindingly obvious, I don't really feel the need.]

[benhall.1]

... oh, and MTGuru - I think you were expressing what I was trying to express before - only a helluva lot better than me! The tune we're talking about, in other words, put in short, is in G major. Not particularly modal. Not lydian.

[Fiddlerwill - if you look back to near the start of the thread, you'll see that we started off being confused between two different tunes. Just check that you haven't suffered the same fate we did at the start and got the 'wrong' Gillan's Apples. }

[benhall.1]

I'd also agree with MTGuru (assuming I've read him right) that there aren't any lydian tunes - properly speaking - in ITM. Lydia doesn't get a look in at ITM - she's more of an intellectual, ivory-tower kind of girl.

[hans]

She seems to have flings with Jaz and Roc.

What about her sister Phrygia?
Has she visited Ireland? Or Scotland?
I'd like to meet her.

[MTGuru]

I'd also agree with MTGuru (assuming I've read him right) that there aren't any lydian tunes

Well, I'd never say never ... I think you could regard the ambiguous C/C# (so-called C supernatural) in G tunes as a "Lydian tendency" - though motivated, I think, as can happen, as much by the physical mechanics of the wind instruments as by purely modal aesthetics.

Or take a hypothetical reel (which I just made up):

[K:GLyd]G2Bc dGBc|dedB GABd|cA~A2 EA~A2|cdef gedB| etc.

I can imagine a tune like this, with an implied major II functioning as the dominant. But this sort of Lydian harmonic (and corresponding melodic) scheme is hardly common in the ITM I'm familiar with. And gapped major tunes with a more usual implied I-(IV)-V are hard to fit into a Procrustean bed of Lydian (the IV being most problematic).

[hans]

Or take a hypothetical reel (which I just made up):

[K:GLyd]G2Bc dGBc|dedB GABd|cA~A2 EA~A2|cdef gedB| etc.

I can imagine a tune like this, with an implied major II functioning as the dominant. But this sort of Lydian harmonic (and corresponding melodic) scheme is hardly common in the ITM I'm familiar with.

And that dominant major II screems out to become the tonal center of the whole tune, i.e. to become entirely Mixolydian (Amix instead of Glyd).

BTW does abc software recognise Glyd?

[MTGuru]

Just adding: Offhand, the only truly Lydian bit I can remember in the wild is in a setting of The Jolly Seven played by Martin Hayes a few years ago at the Plough and Stars in San Francisco. My transcription:

X:1
T:Jolly Seven, The
S:Martin Hayes
Z:MTGuru
M:C|
K:A
cd|efed cAAB|cded cAAc|efed cdef|gfge dBcd|
efed cAAB|cAeA cAAc|efed cdef|gfge dBGB|]
[K:CLyd]~c2ec gcec|~c2ec dBGB|~c2ec gcea|afge dBGB|
~c2ec gcec|~c2ec dBGB|cdef ~g2fg|afge d2|]

To my ear, the repeated F#'s in the B part give it a strong and deliberate Lydian feel, and really emphasize that the entire tonal center of the B part has shifted.

[benhall.1]

I'm not sure Phrygia would be interested, Hans. Doria's the friendliest. Aeolia is a bit of an airhead, and Locria is just plain scary.