Fergie - i think you are conflating some things. humans have been creating modal music for for as long as music has existed. "mode" being some melodic framework containing a pitch hierarchy. no one owns this idea. nor tetrachordal theory, which has arisen intuitively among many cultures.*
i am saying that the modal system discussed in this thread (as opposed to the modes of the arab world, the mediterranean, turkey, india, china, japan, indonesia, etc.) is a reflection of european aesthetics at a particular point in history. it is NOT a remnant of ancient greek music, even though it uses greek names. this was due to the re-discovery and translation of ancient greek treatises in the arab world and then europe, and a general romanticization of antiquity.*
the ancient greeks DID recognize a pythagorean scale of the type e f g a b c d e (along with who knows how many non-pythagorean scales). but scale is not the same as mode. the scale is just a set of pitches. the mode is the set of 'rules' that govern how the scale is employed. on that point, ancient greek and medieval european practices are completely different.*
the take home message here (as far as i see it) is that we have completely lost the meaning of "mode." as they are used in contemporary western music, they are technically scales. this unfortunate terminology is a result of history, not practice. *i am not trying to make "mode" out to be some mystical, untouchable thing, but it is simply on a different level than how most western musicians are used to thinking. in north indian music, you would spend months learning ONE mode. all this is the reason why so many western musicians are confused about the application of modes *ahem scales.* it is just a set of 7 scales, of which the familiar major and minor are 2.
LOL i am sorry to say you are contradicting yourself again..
Please understand I have no interest in arguing points that are all ready accepted, or in the semantics of language in how this is presented.
For me I was taught that the four original modes the Greeks wrote about were later expanded by Western composers, so thus the Greeks conceived the idea.
Scales are the same as modes, in their construction and maybe in their use..they are both just intervals organised in a certain way...this the Greeks done so as far as we know the idea was conceived as far as we know by them being the earliest writings we have on the subject. The fact that the instrumentation was not present at the time to fully use them is nether here nor there. Sometimes in life ideas have to wait till technology catches up.
Older instruments really did not have the ability to change key, so they could be seen as being modal or diatonic to certain keys..a bit like Harmonicas, harps, xylophones, etc but with the introduction of chromatic instruments,and say valve technology in brass instruments, more modes, scales and keys,and such became available to the composers, so the need to study a certain mode or key became less important to the player as music now modulated and incorporated various instruments through arrangement of them and the notes they produced.
Now all this is as I said just *just part of what I was taught and as such so were many others. I neither have the depth of knowledge or education to say what is actually now regarded as the correct way to present or talk about them....which is why I am reading these threads.
But if you read your posts you dis-agree then agree, then you say not really, but then say it is so...... Again I am not being picky or smart, just pointing out that you agree to disagree with what you post......not what I post.
All i say is the Greeks are the earliest known written examples I know of in terms of written music theory that we still use today in some form.
The fact Greeks used Tetrachords the ideas of making more or new variations of intervals may have been apparent to them, but with no way to represent them in musical instrumentation.
F.
