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=               Scales and Modes in Scottish Traditional Music              =
=                                  Jack Campin                              =
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Cautionary Notes
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All the above is somewhat oversimplified: in fact the pitches of Scottish
traditional music are rarely taken from the twelve-note equally-tempered
scale (except for instruments like the accordion that offer no choice in
the matter).  The precise tuning of notes in the scale may be modified to
get purer harmonies or (particularly with Cape Breton fiddling) to imitate
the sound of the bagpipe scale on other instruments.  When this happens,
relative modes need not have exactly the same pitch set; a fiddler may
bend the notes of an A mixolydian tune to bring it closer to the bagpipe
pitch set, while playing a D major tune in something close to the equally
tempered pitch set.  ABC does not yet handle microtonality: when it does
I'll return to this issue.

The other oversimplification I've made is in reducing modes to bare
sequences of notes.  In Middle Eastern and Indian music theory, the
notion of a mode (raga, makam, dastgah) includes a set of melodic
formulas used with it - short fragments that are used to put melodies
together, particularly at cadences.  This happens to some extent in
Scottish traditional music; think of all the hornpipes in G major that
end with BGG or GBG.  In modern music theory the "sequence of pitches"
idea of mode I've used here is more often called "octave species", and
"mode" now tends to be used in the West Asian manner, as this is also
helpful in analyzing mediaeval and Renaissance art music.  I hope to
come back to this some time and write a comparable document on the
melodic formulas of Scottish music.


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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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