Tonal and Modal Music

Tonal Music

Tonal music is organised around a key or tonal centre. Individual notes have different pitches, and their relationships to that centre shape the music’s sense of direction and resolution.

The principal tonal functions discussed here are:

– Tonic: the key’s central note, also called the first degree or tonal home.

– Subdominant: the fourth degree of the key.

– Dominant: the fifth degree of the key.

Tonal harmony is shaped by the relationships between these functions.

Major and minor keys form the basis of the tonal system discussed here. Chords built on the main scale degrees establish the key through their relationships and movement towards the tonic.

Modal Music

A mode organises notes into a particular interval pattern around a tonal centre. Different notes acquire different degrees of stability or tension, giving each mode its characteristic sound. Modal approaches occur in many musical traditions.

The article relates the systematic use of modes to medieval European music, roughly the seventh to fourteenth centuries. Modes also occur in many other traditions. The following list shows the seven diatonic modes using the notes of C major as a reference.

These are:

– Ionian: the first degree of the major scale (C in C major).

– Dorian: the second degree of the major scale (D in C major).

– Phrygian: the third degree of the major scale (E in C major).

– Lydian: the fourth degree of the major scale (F in C major).

– Mixolydian: the fifth degree of the major scale (G in C major).

– Aeolian: the sixth degree of the major scale (A in C major).

– Locrian: the seventh degree of the major scale (B in C major).

Modes can have major or minor characteristics, but each has its own pattern of intervals from its starting note. Those patterns give modes different colours. They can invite comparison with makam systems, but the two are not interchangeable: a makam includes melodic behaviour and, in many traditions, intervals beyond the piano’s equal-tempered notes.

Zeynep Fuçucuoğlu
Rekor Sanat – Piano Teacher