Mea culpa and week 4...

SO sorry for my absenteeism! I've got myself a nasty sinus infection with a side of bronchitis...not at all the thing anyone wants the first week of school!

So, although week 4 is now partly over...

Rising Level 2's: Choose your favorite letter name. Now, build a do pentatone on it...and you have five letter names (so, for example, if I chose G, I would have built G, A, B, D, E). Now, convert those into keys by what you know about scale degrees and their corresponding key areas (in my parenthetical world, I would have G Major, a minor, b minor, D Major, and e minor). Find an Ottman from chapters 8, 9, or 10 to correspond with each key and sing it.

Rising Level 3's: Choose your favorite letter name. Now, build a do pentatone on it...and you have five letter names (see above). Now, your mission (if possible) is to find: an Ionian example built on your first note, a Dorian on your 2nd, a Phrygian on your 3rd, a Mixolydian on your 4th, and an Aeolian on your 5th (reverting to the G pentatone, I'd have to find G Ionian, A Dorian, B Phrygian, D Mixolydian, and E Aeolian). You can use any source you want....start with Ottman, but feel free to search further afield and sing what you find. If you can't find something, cut yourself a break and do what the rising level 2's were asked to do.

OOOoooo, and lucky for you all....I'm enrolled in this very interesting Analysis of Baroque Music course, and the professor (bless him) gave us a little lecture on Zarlino at the first class. Now before anyone starts singing "Batti, batti", let me remind you of who Zarlino is. He's the guy who, in his 1558 treatise, Le Istitutione Harmoniche, re-numbered the church modes with Ionian as #1. This was a big deal. You see, in 1547, Heinrich Glarean (aka Glareanus) had proposed in his treatise, Dodecachordon, that there were, in fact, twelve modes instead of the eight everyone had discussed up to then...the original eight were Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian and their corresponding hypo- modes (the hypos use the same final and arrangement of whole and half steps as the primary modes, but their ambitus goes above and below the final as opposed to just traversing the octave from final-final...so, for example, a piece that ended on D, but whose range was ABCDEFGA would be Hypodorian, not Dorian...I know, weird...don't worry about it). By adding Ionian/Hypoionian and Aeolian/Hypoaeolian, Glarean brought us up to 12 modes total. But, he still called Dorian #1 when he was tallying them all up, inferring that Dorian was still the most important of the modes (which, presumably, has a lot to do with ancient ideas of what modes did to people's emotions...Dorian was supposed to be calming, ennobling, etc...as you all know, it just makes me kind of think of pirates...). Well, then, Zarlino actually decided in 1558 that everyone was using Ionian for their compositions more than they were using Dorian, so he made Ionian the new king and called it #1....which ultimately paved the way for the tonal system, but created a lot of scrambling for people who were concerned about tuning, temperament, etc...all the way up to (and, really, beyond) J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and its compositions in all 24 major and minor keys.

I know, I know....geekery reigns supreme on this blog. Embrace it, guys...remember, you can always use it to impress your friends at parties!