Re: SHA key?

Keith Freeman wrote:
Read the whole thing I wrote about So What, not 8 words taken out of
context.
I did.

By the way, and I stand open for correction on this, but I believe
"modal" only refers to the fact that there are virtually no, or very
few, chord changes in the tune.
Yes and no. When Miles came up with his concept of modal music the
tunes _did_ stay in one key or just a couple of keys. But a modal
piece can hop about between a number of different keys: Aebersold has
some examples in his playalongs.

If I'm right, then your use of the
word modal in this context has no bearing on the key of the song and
is irrelevant.
You don't seem to realize that 'modal' has several meanings. Gregorian
chant, for instance, was modal: it was based on the relationship of a
scale or mode to the finalis, the ending note (what we now call the
tonic). So a piece of Gregorian was in a particular mode: Dorian,
Phrygian, Mixolydian or whatever. What note (C, D etc.) it ended (and
usually started) on was unimportant: that would be selected to match
the singers' range.

Later on in Western music history counterpoint and chordal writing
developed. The practice of musica ficta meant that the leading note
(for example F leading to G) was not notated with a sharp, but the
singers sang an F# all the same. In the 20th century people started
studying and performing this music again but didn't know about musica
ficta, so they thought the cadence in my example was | Dm | G (ma or
mi) and called it a 'modal cadence' - meaning that the leading note
was not sharpened - and composers started writing music with those
'modal' cadences.

Jazz musicians in the 50s were listening to all sorts of modern
'classical' music - Ravel, Stravinsky etc. - and would have heard
that.

I doubt if you'll find a professional jazz musician who doesn't
recognize that keys can be modal, that you can write and play a piece
in e.g. B Phrygian. It's a sound, and it simply doesn't make sense to
say that it's actually in G major because that's the key signature.
The fact is that it ends on a Bm sound (and in most cases will start
on that sound), and all the intervallic and chordal relationships
relate to the B tonic.

-Keith

OK, thanks for the time you took to explain all this. I'll take the time to
think it through, though I've always thought this whole "mode" thing had no
real value in the making of music, perhaps just in the theoretical analysis
of it. To be honest, I am going to have trouble moving off of that position.
But we all learn from other people's perspectives.


.

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