AST MONTH, I attended a national conference of music theorists. Such conferences offer the cutting edge of current scholarship and act like a weathervane, indicating the direction in which the field is moving. Over a few days, you can hear a bewildering variety of viewpoints and opinions about all sorts of music. Naturally, I tend to gravitate toward the more historical topics. Several times at this conference, both in panels and presentations and in informal conversations, I heard the assertion that the modes (as in the eight church modes) are either not real or that it is not a useful way to think about, say, sixteenth-century polyphony.
As someone who believes firmly in the modes and their usefulness in understanding all sorts of music, I found this assertion pretty interesting, especially because my instinctual reaction is vehement disagreement. I’ve been thinking a lot about the modes lately, since I’ve been commissioned to review a couple of very good recent books on various modal subjects (by Michael Dodds and Daniel Saulnier). From my point of view, the eight church modes that go along with Gregorian chant are something I interact with on a daily basis, for the practical musician in me, they are just facts, whose reality I could hardly question. And yet, my point of view is shaped by all manner of experiences not shared by many of my academic colleagues, and I owe it to them to try to understand their thinking.
Arguments Against the Existence of the Modes • There is, indeed, a grain of truth behind the idea of the unreality or futility of modal thinking. That is, the history of the modes in Western music amounts almost entirely to several successive misunderstandings. The ancient Greeks had a rather complex tonal system, part of which involved transpositions of a scale that got geographic names, such as Dorian, Phrygian, and so on.
Through a series of writers in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the names of the modes were transferred from the transpositions of the tonal system to the octave species and then further into the eight church modes. The eight-mode system was something of a Procrustean bed, which worked only imperfectly when applied to the Gregorian repertoire that was just emerging in the ninth century as a synthesis of Roman and Gallican chant traditions. Some chants are just not easily categorized into the eight modes, and all kinds of compromises, smoothing out, exceptions, transpositions, and recompositions had to take place while the theory and the melodies were coalescing.
If the Medievals got the Greeks wrong, the problems were only compounded by the introduction of polyphony and other styles of music. Most of the more recent modal revivals have failed to replicate how the modes work in the chant tradition. For instance, the way the Lydian mode works for Beethoven in the otherworldly slow movement of opus 132 (or in Bruckner’s Os justi) is that the scale requires a raised fourth scale degree (a tritone above the tonic pitch), but of course, this is not a rigorous requirement of a chant in mode 5. The same can be said for the jazz modes. For over a millenium, we have only compounded the misunderstandings, blundering through our composition, performance, and theorizing with an insufficient understanding of historical reality. So it goes.
Sed contra • And yet, I’m convinced that there is a golden, Lydian thread to be traced from the earliest Gregorian tonaries through Palestrina and Beethoven and Bruckner (and Fauré) all the way to the chant accompaniment style of Fontgombault in Alleluia Assumpta est, and it is transcendently, radiantly beautiful. But it is important to approach this in a certain contemplative spirit, trying to enter into the sympathies and outlooks of each of these different musical styles. I wish I could put into words all the many modal impressions that I have, but, alas, words always come short of the reality. The subject is complicated, and music is so hard to talk about or write about. Of course it is natural for people whose musical diet contains almost nothing Gregorian to reach the conclusion that it is the misunderstandings and the failed theoretical systems that make up the entirety of modal thought, which might as well be jettisoned if we want to say anything useful about Renaissance polyphony (or Beethoven). I am guided instead by a more historicist view, nourished of course by a diet rich in Gregorian chants.
Respondeo • In my next several posts here, I would like to share some of my thoughts on the nature and reality and usefulness of the modes. Today I will address the church keys. I don’t mean the kind of tool you use to open a bottle of Birra Nursia. I mean a specific practical system developed by church musicians around the beginning of the seventeenth century. At that time, there was a musico-theoretical debate about the number and the nature of the modes. In addition to the eight chant modes, theorists like Glareanus and Zarlino had proposed adding four more (with finals on A and C) to give a more complete account of how modes work in polyphony:
There are advantages to the twelve-mode system. For one thing, pieces ending on C no longer have to be thought of as in a transposed mode 5 (think Credo 3 or the simple Alma Redemptoris). The eight modes have only four possible finals, so any chants ending on A, B, or C (there are numerous examples of each case) must be considered as transposed versions of the other modes, which adds a layer of complexity. The twelve modes are especially useful in polyphony, when the whole distinction between plagal and authentic modes and modes based on diatonic scales get overwhelmed by the added complexity of accidental tones and the wide ranges of vocal polyphony. Polyphonic pieces can end on any note, so a more complete system of possible final sonorities is very helpful for categorization; the twelve-mode theory caught on accordingly. For practical church musicians, this meant that one had to learn the eight modes for use with chant (and according to Dodds, Vespers was becoming more and more important for the experience of Catholic church musicians after the council of Trent) and the twelve modes for polyphony.
The Church Keys • One compromise they came up was what we now call the church keys, which started as a way to accompany the psalm tones. We all know that some psalm tones are higher than others (tone 2 has a reciting tone of F, while tone 7 has a reciting tone on D a sixth higher). As a result, one always ends up transposing some of the tones down and others up so that they are all comfortable for the community that is singing. With organ accompaniment, it is useful to come up with a systematic way to do this. The system that developed in the seventeenth century is called variously the church keys, the church tones, the ecclesiastical tones, or the psalm-tone tonalities, a modern, psalm-tone oriented version of the eight modes for musicians who also had to deal with other modal systems. We can refer to them by the triad built on the final pitch (either of the psalm tone or of the associated antiphon), which ends up being foundational in the accompaniment and in the composition of harmonizations of the psalm tone. If we let these triads also stand in for the key in which one accompanies (for instance, the G minor triad of mode 2 eventually just comes to be indistinguishable from key of G minor), you can see the pathway for how modal thinking continued to permeate music making in the seventeenth century and beyond. Here are the church tones or keys, as given by Nivers:
- Tone 1 D minor
- Tone 2 G minor
- Tone 3 A minor
- Tone 4 E minor
- Tone 5 C major
- Tone 6 F major
- Tone 7 D major
- Tone 8 G major
This system had remarkable staying power, precisely at a time when the idea of major and minor keys as we teach them today was first being formulated by theorists. You can find it in plenty of French Baroque organ music. It is still not a bad way to think about accompanying vespers, although I will suggest some modifications below. More interestingly for our purposes, I would suggest that the ethos and characteristics and qualities of each of the eight chant modes persist in these particular major and minor keys, even after the original, mode-oriented purpose of the church keys went away. In other words, composers and musicians retained some mode-based distinction between, say, D minor and E minor or C major and F major that had some basis in more traditional conceptions of modal ethos.
The Modes as Keys at Present • It is also interesting that this list partially overlaps with the way many of us accompany or at least pitch chant today, taking our lead from the abbey of Fontgombault and its daughter houses. Here are my usual pitch levels for chants in each of the eight modes:
- Mode 1 D-sharp minor (a semitone than the church key, although D minor is a viable alternative)
- Mode 2 G minor
- Mode 3 D minor (a step lower than the church key, which is reckoned from the chord ending the psalm tone)
- Mode 4 E minor
- Mode 5 E-flat major (higher than the church key, although lower versions of this mode are more common for congregational chanting)
- Mode 6 F major
- Mode 7 D major
- Mode 8 F major (a step lower than the church key)
Surely most schola directors have a similar starting point when approaching Gregorian chant, although adjustments can always be made for the particular needs of the choir present. The unifying thread here is that the tenor or reciting tone of the mode (and its associated psalm tone) is always on either A or B-flat, which are comfortable pitches for most voices. I’m sure my pitch choices are fairly common these days. As a result, it is quite interesting that we can discern a certain continuity between the old church keys and my own practice. Modes 1 and 6 have migrated up a semitone onto the black keys of the keyboard, which was not possible with the tuning systems used on organs around 1600. Modes 3 and 8 have also gone down a step, which makes those psalm tones much more comfortable for most singers. However, my system is considerably less systematic, since some modes share final pitches (i.e., 6 and 8), which is something the designers of the church-key system avoided in favor of a more consistent array of keys.
The Takeaway • I interact with a lot of different musical styles in the course of a typical day of playing, singing, and teaching. In all the music making I do of whatever variety, my experience is subtly colored by the modal connections between the chant modes, the church keys, and my own chant practice in the classroom. I see all these things as one great project, united by the thread of modality. The way that my mind conceives of each mode and each key as I play or sing is a subtle but very deep thing. In opposition to my academic colleagues who so smoothly dismiss the modes, I believe that all these associations, gleaned from year after year of faithfully chanting what the Church sets before me to chant, continue to form the mental background for how I think about the way music is constructed harmonically. Everything I think about these various keys and tonalities is inseparable from the way I think about the modes. And this is not just true for Renaissance polyphony, but for all the music I encounter. In my next post, I will discuss how I’m trying to pass my own modal intuitions and sensibilities on to my music students.
