In Lydian this note is the sharped 4th, which is a ‘brighter than usual 4th’. This is a very dissonant thing for a mode to have! In music jargon we say it like this: these modes have a note that’s a tritone above the tonic. Let’s see it! Inverting the brightest, Lydian:īy the way, it’s also cool how both the ultra-bright Lydian and the ultra-dark Locrian, and only these modes, have a note that’s exactly half an octave above the 1. If we invert each mode-literally turn it upside down, by playing the pattern of whole and half steps from the top of the scale down instead of from bottom to top-the brighter modes become the darker modes, and vice versa! You can see lots of nice patterns here, like how the flats come in ‘from top down’ as the modes get darker: that is, starting at the 7th, then the 6th and then the 5th… but also, interspersed with these, the 3rd and then the 2nd.īut here’s something even cooler, which I also learned from Rob van Hal (though he was surely not the first to discover it). And one, Lydian, is even brighter than major (= Ionian), because it has no flats and one sharp! The more notes are flatted compared to the major scale, the ‘darker’ a mode sounds! The fewer are flatted, the ‘brighter’ it sounds. I learned about it from Rob van Hal, here: Indeed, there is a marvelous theory of how modes sound ‘bright’ or ‘dark’ depending on how many notes are sharped-that is, raised a half-tone-or flatted-that is, lowered a half-tone. This may seem crazily mathematical, but Leibniz said “Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”
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