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=               Scales and Modes in Scottish Traditional Music              =
=                                  Jack Campin                              =
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Getting It Wrong
================

Every possible kind of confusion about these modes has been perpetrated at
some time or other by people used to the major/minor tonal system: mishearing
pitches, "correcting" them, treating them like the passing chromaticisms of
art music and adding other chromaticisms in a misguided attempt to match,
making arrangements where the harmony was in a different mode entirely,
failing to notice gaps, assuming that all pentatonic tunes are in the same
mode, and wild speculation about their origins.

Donald Fergusson's book "Beyond the Furthest Hebrides" comments on the song
"Eilean Mo Chridhe":

        The melody of this song has become one of the most popular of all
        Hebridean melodies through its use for the English song entitled
        'Westering Home'. The same melody also became very popular through
        its use in much older songs, 'The Muckin' O' Geordie's Byre' and
        the beautiful 'Bonnie Strathyre'. 

        The scale (Hexatonic) makes interesting speculation for the 
        missing note is the 7th or leading note. As written here, the 
        scale is B flat and the 7th note should be A sharp (natural). But 
        the  mood or feel of the music, especially in "Eilean Mo Chridhe" 
        is quite melancholy. Could the missing note be A flat? If it is 
        then the scale is the ancient and popular one of so much Gaelic 
        melody - Mixolydian.

Someone should tell Ferguson that there are six other notes of the
chromatic pitch set missing too.  Perhaps he should get together with
the musical estate of the late Sir Arthur Sullivan and start looking
for the Lost Chord.  Ferguson's mistake is of the same type as the more
familiar one that classifies gapped modes as "major" or "minor" because
the notes they have happen to match those scales; it took the musicology
of the twentieth century to enlarge the range of possible confusions to
include mixolydian as well.

There are two persistent muddles which have almost become folk traditions
in their own right: adapting pipe tunes to the fiddle while ignoring the
tonality essential to the pipes, and the other way round.  A simple rule
of thumb: if a fiddle tune fits the range of the pipes and has a G sharp
in it, chances are it was adapted from the pipes and the fiddler/editor
screwed up.  (A currently popular series of Scottish fiddle tune books
does this a lot.  It compensates by decorating every page with pseudo-
Celtic knotwork borders to tell you how authentically Scottish it is).

John Curwen, in his text on the sol-fa system, gives an interesting example
of folk intuition fighting back against the "common practice" tonal system.
This old psalm tune dates from the earliest days of the Reformation and was
one of the most widely sung in Scotland:

X:0
T:Dundee
G:psalm tune
M:2/2
L:1/2
Q:1/2=80
K:DDor
% dorian/minor hexatonic
D|DE|FE|DD|C||F|AG|FE|F||
F|AG|FE|DD|C||F|ED|DC|D|]

In Este's psalm book of 1592 this acquired the sharpened leading notes of
the minor scale, each one corresponding to an A major dominant chord:

X:0
T:Dundee
G:psalm tune
M:2/2
L:1/2
Q:1/2=80
K:DDor
D|DE|FE|DD|^C||F|AG|F E|F||
F|AG|FE|DD|^C||F|ED|D^C|D|]

and later compilers wrote the tune as minor:

X:0
T:Dundee
G:psalm tune
M:2/2
L:1/2
Q:1/2=80
K:AMin
A|AB|cB|AA|^G||c|ed|c B|c||
c|ed|cB|AA|^G||c|BA|A^G|A|]

This proved impossible for most people in England and even more in Scotland,
particularly in the Highlands, to sing without instrumental accompaniment
(which in Scotland was prohibited for centuries).  They found two alternate
strategies for dealing with the sharpened seventh they'd had foisted on them.
One was to ignore the books and carry on singing what they had always done.
The other was to replace the seventh (the third in the major chord) with
a fifth (the root of the major chord).  This, after a cascade of melodic
adjustments, finally led to a new tune, back in the same mode as "Dundee":

X:0
T:Coleshill
G:psalm tune
M:2/2
L:1/2
Q:1/2=80
K:AMin
% dorian/minor hexatonic
A|AG|cG|AA|E||c|ed|c   G|c||
c|ed|cG|AA|E||c|GA|d/c/B|A|]

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==  (c) Jack Campin         http://www.campin.me.uk/          August 2009  ==
==        11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland     ==
==                                                                         ==
==              these pages: http://tinyurl.com/scottishmodes              ==
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