Let’s Play Music #13
Modal Mixture Through Neighboring Keys
Welcome to the Twilight Zone of Endless Musical Imagination
Listening to music and playing music tend to be two different things when I speak with others about the two topics. I find that the musical aptitude of a person can change “listening” from enjoyment to learning and back again. Playing music also varies as the exercise of “playing” starts out as learning, becomes enjoyment, and then evolves into the enjoyment of discovering.
For me, modal mixture is the point where listening and learning come together. At this point they are one thing. The act of listening requires playing, which demands that you truly listen to what the notes are saying. If you’ve never heard of modal modulation, modal interchange, or modal mixture, then buckle up. We’re going straight into discovering new sounds and there’s no turning back.
A Quick Recap
Our previous lesson involved taking the chords of a mode and adding in chords from a relative mode to expand our pallet of sounds. Below is F Ionian and F Aeolian. We can play the chords of F Ionian to make a song and borrow chords from F Aeolian as we see fit. Previously we have been using modal modulation and interchange, but now we’re getting into the fun stuff.
If we just borrow a chord for a brief time, then it is a form of modulation because we just modulate from F Ionian’s chords to one of F Aeolian’s chords and back again. Doing so does not change the key because borrowing a chord or notes from F Aeolian just added some brief color to F Ionian.
If we stayed with the F Aeolian chords for several bars or more before going back to the F Ionian set, then we would be using interchange. We would start in the key of F major for F Ionian and then temporarily move to just the sound of F Aeolian in the key of Ab major. Even a bar and a half in F Aeolian can be considered interchange because we did more than just a quick borrowing of a chord.
Stepping Out of Our Comfort Zone
Mixture is where we take the notes of F Ionian and F Aeolian and fuse them together. The result is a ten note scale that allows us to break free of the constraints of a seven note scale. There are many ways to look at this concept in simple terms to more ambiguous ideas.
We can think of it as being able to play any of the fourteen chords found in F Ionian and F Aeolian as we see fit.
We can play any chord from either mode and use any of the ten notes in our melodies to add expressiveness.
We can start with two modes, use any of the ten notes as our colors, and then sharpen or flatten modes to gain access to textures.
That last one is a doozy. It’s also the goal of this lesson as we will be focusing on using neighboring keys on the Circle of Fifths to help guide us towards some great modulations. We’ll also be looking at a part of “What A Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong because it uses F Ionian and F Aeolian along with a borrowed chord. This will be the foundation for practicing the art of modulating keys. Before we get into it, let me say that this is not a jazz concept. It is used a lot in jazz, but this is a music concept, and it sounds great in everything from gospel to thrash metal.
Eight Wonderful Bars
Looking at just the first eight bars of “What A Wonderful World” in F major gives us quite a lot of movement to analyze.
The first three bars are straight forward. We play F Ionian’s I, ii, and IV chords and then walk back down with iii, ii, I.
Bar four uses A7. If we played C7 to Dm in bar four, then we would just play the Diatonic Dominant chord before Dm because the dominant chord C7 is diatonic to F Ionian. A7 is the Secondary Dominant of Dm and is notated as V7/vi because it is the “V7 of” our vi chord. Playing A7 to Dm Tonicizes the note D and makes Dm feel like the true Tonic end chord for a moment. A7 to Dm also makes it feel like Dm is the i chord, which causes F to act as the bIII chord. We need to get back to F as the I chord, so C7 to F will help us Tonicize F.
To get to C7 we play Db in bar five. This can be played two ways. Db can be a DbMaj7 borrowed from F Aeolian. This is the Chromatic Sub-Mediant and lets us use DbMaj7 as a way-point between Dm and C7. The other option is the Db can be Db7. This is the Secondary TriTone Substitute of C. A TriTone Sub is just a Dominant chord that is a half-step above a targeted chord. In this case C is the target and Db7 is the TriTone Sub. Db7 is a Secondary chord because it is not diatonic to our original scale.
If that isn’t fancy enough, the song then uses a slash chord in bar six. Gm7/C is read as “Gm7 over the note C”. This is a lot easier to understand than C7sus9 sus11 and lets us see how we are going back to F as the I chord. C is the target of Db in any context as we chromatically walk down from Dm in bar 4, through Db, to get to C. Instead of just playing C7 in bar six, we play Gm7 over C. Gm7 is the ii chord of F and C is the perfect fifth of F. The note Bb found in the Gm7 chord also makes C feel dominant because Bb is the b7 of C. This means that C7 is leading to F while Gm7 also brings us to F. The fancy part is that we drop the Gm7 and play C7 at the end of bar 6. This lets Gm7 allude to the idea of going to F, while C7 confirms that we are going to F.
Bar seven starts with the target chord created by bar six, but then we play F Augmented (F+). There are no augmented chords that are diatonic to the major scale or any of its modes. The F+ chord lets us take F major’s note of C, walk it up to C# (which is borrowed from F Aeolian’s enharmonic note of Db), and then one more half-step up to D found in BbMaj7.
Bar eight gives us BbMaj7, which can be thought of as Dm/Bb or Dm over Bb. We could play bar eight as | Dm C7 |, but we’d end up reintroducing Dm which already sounded like a potential end Tonic in bar four. By playing F to F+ to BbMaj7 to C7 we use only chords that start with major third intervals and move continuously upwards to C7, which again tonicizes F to confirm that we have been in F Ionian the entire time.
Overall, we have modulated three times using A7, Db, and F+. There is no interchange because each of these three chords was used briefly. Aside from a moment of treating Dm as the true Tonic, we have been in F Ionian the whole time. Check out the diagram below as a visual of what we’ve gone over while listening to the song and the movement of the piece will be easier to understand.
Mixing In Textures
Music theory is as much about rules as it is about rule breaking. Now, we’re going to use some rules to break others. The rule is simple: you can take a mode and sharpen it or flatten it by going to a neighboring key on the circle of fifths.
Above are the modes in fifths which groups the major modes, minor modes, and our one diminished mode. It also has each mode only one degree away from each other. This means that Ionian can be sharpened by sharpening the fourth degree to become Lydian or be flattened by flattening the seventh degree to become Mixolydian. As we alter modes by flattening or sharpening them, we change keys. C Ionian is of course in the key of C. The key of G’s fourth degree note is C, so it has C Lydian. The key of F’s fifth degree is C, so it contains C Mixolydian.
This continues until we go beyond the key of Db. Past the key of Db is the key of Gb, which would have Cb Lydian. The same type of thing happens past the key of G, where D’s seventh degree starts C# Locrian. By going around the circle you can use C and all the modes across seven keys. Then you can either flatten or sharpen C and start the list of modes in fifths over again from the other end.
The three keys at the bottom can be confusing because it looks like the keys C# and Db are the same. They may create the same tones, but they are different keys. Knowing which to use can be as simple as starting in Db because you want to modulate to Ab next to it and working in all flat notes is a lot easier than switching between altered types. Of course, if you are writing a song in the keys C# and E, but want to borrow from Ab, then you’re going to have to suck it up and accept that you’re using sharps and flats together.
To put this into a realistic example we’ll start with our eight bars of “What A Wonderful World” and modify it using neighboring keys/modes, borrowed chords, and borrowed notes.
As we go through the changes I made, keep in mind that we are in the key of F. The keys C and Bb are the neighboring keys, so we will either sharpen Bb to B or flatten E to Eb. Any other modifications will still come from F Ionian’s parallel mode of F Aeolian, which has the notes Ab, Bb, C, Db, Eb, F, and G.
The first modulation is in bar 1. Am is our Phrygian iii chord, so I when to the key of Bb to borrow A Locrian for an Am7b5. By voicing Am with the notes A-C-E-A we can take the higher A, move it to G in our modulated Am7b5, and move that note down to F in the Bb chord at the beginning of bar 2.
We can do the same thing with Am to Ab+ to Gm7. This time the Ab comes from F Aeolian in parallel to F Ionian. We keep the rest of the notes the same. Borrowing this one note turns A Phrygian into Ab Lydian Augmented: Ab, Bb, C, D, E, F, G and 1, 2, 3, #4, #5, 6, 7. This scale is used just to walk the root note of A in Am down to Ab and then down to G. Walking the root chromatically always gives a deep transition.
Another note movement comes at the end of bar 4. Dm7 is used for the note C, which is moved down to B in the Dm6 chord: D-F-B. That is then moved down to Db as the root note of all chords used in bar 5. Dm6 is a Dorian chord, so using it sharpens D Aeolian to a D Dorian from the key of C. Now we’ve used both of our neighboring keys.
Bar 5 takes DbMaj7 and moves the note C up to Db voiced as Db-F-Ab-Db. This then comes back down to C and then moves to B in Db7: Db-F-Ab-B. This makes Db7 feel like the bII of C in bar 6 with a bII/I feeling, even though it is functioning as bII/V7/I aka Db7 of C7 of F. Moving the note C to Db to C to B is another chromatic move that takes a borrowed Db Lydian chord, moves it down to Db Ionian, and then down to Db Mixolydian. Now we’re modulating borrowed chords.
Bar 6 takes Db as a borrowed note and adds it onto C7 to create C7 b9: C-E-G-Bb-Db. This has some extra tension and exploits Mixolydian b2 from the Harmonic Major Scale. (More on that soon enough.) To make this chord more tense, I dropped the note C to create the fully diminished chord E°7, which then leads to F because E is the leading tone of F.
Bar 8 uses C7 b9 so that the last chord feels like a V7 chord. This way we move back to F and start over without repeating the tension of the E°7 chord.
What To Practice
Practice will focus on the formulas for each mode shown above. Take a song you know, are working on, or wrote, and look for one chord that you want to modulate. You can use the intervals between chords to figure out which mode a chord belongs to. You can also use the chart below.
If your chord is a minor chord and you have a dominant 7 a whole step below or a m7b5 a whole step above, then your minor chord is Aeolian. Take that chord and look at the second and sixth degree notes. For example, Am uses the Aeolian notes A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. The second degree is B and the sixth degree is F. You can then try out playing Am b9 (A-C-E-Bb) for a Phrygian sound or play Am6 (A-C-F#) for a Dorian sound. You could even just play Am7 (A-C-E-G) because it fits all three minor modes and then play a melody that uses Bb as the b2 or F# as the 6th degree.
You’ll likely find plenty of modulations that just don’t work, but when you do find one that works look at the new note you borrowed, like Bb or F#, and see how it ties into the next part of the song. You may be surprised to find that borrowed notes work great in chromatic lines, like how we used Db between D and C in “What A Wonderful World.” Let me know what you tried in the comments along with any questions. Until next time.