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Symposium
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On Miles and the Modes
William Thomson
with conviction about the musical substance of times long past is not easy.
Speculating about how that music may have been experienced by its contemporaries
is even more difficult, and thus musicology's most astute figures have warned repeatedly
of imposing our own cultural biases on to artifacts of earlier eras, other cultures, even
with the best of intentions. Theorizing about matters left unexplained (or even unmen-
tioned) by contemporaneous observers is at best risky, at worst fatuous. In this sense,
even our West-European musical heritage is a foreign country, a body of artifacts whose
remote ethnicity defies our understanding them as natives. Historians Leo Treitler1 and
Frederick Bashour,2 and historian-theorist Carl Dahlhaus3 are but three of many promi-
nent scholars who have insisted that after-the-fact theories of remote musics are high-
risk ventures. When those theories lack corroboration in the conceptual underpinnings
provided by concurrent writers they play dubious (if not damaging) roles in our struggle
to understand. The larger ontological/historical issue, as it pertains to music, has been
argued in some depth from several perspectives.4
That Dahlhaus-Bashour-Treitler reading of history does not take kindly to theory
makers who find modern wines in ancient vessels (nor vice-versa, for that matter). For
example, those who detect deposits of such things as major or minor scales or major
triads, in music vinted before their time, are prisoners of the worst strain of stylistic
myopia. The formulation is simple: If it wasn't conceptualized, the story goes, then
nobody perceived it.5
Speaking directly to that issue, historian Thomas Christensen warns against infer-
ences of "tonal traces" in "pre-tonal musics." We risk "projecting our own culturally
biased conceptions of tonality - however defined - upon a repertoire for which it has no
conceptual basis."6 And he sharpens that general warning three pages later in a passage
that speaks directly to the condition of tonality in earlier music. Music theorists risk
anachronism when they interpret earlier musics by norms consolidated much later.
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1 8 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM
7Ibid.
8Dolores Pesce, The Affinities and Medieval Transposition (Bloomineton: Indiana University Press. 1987V 115
9Patricia Carpenter, "Tonal Coherence in a Motet of Dufav " Journal ofMusir Then™ 1 7 n o/n\ £?
10In"ModesandStructureintheMusicofJosauin.".//4A/4S'26n973V 189-239: 189
"Ibid., 191.
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ON MILES AND THE MODES 19
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20 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM
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ON MILES AND THE MODES 2 1
Dml - 3m - Dml
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22 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM
1^ "r r piJ'-JjniH if
hp'jj' I I'gilji'W
iffii'MiJ'iijjt i^jjiiiin
ir ' '- 1 inTi h 1 1 1 1
8va
2 'My tr
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ON MILES AND THE MODES 23
"Perhaps the B - F tritone embedded in the background figure is crucial here as a tonal marke
Richmond Browne, Helen Brown, and David Butler have argued.
23" Added 6th" refers here to the cliche" tradition in 20th-century popular music and jazz which added a major 6
(above a designated root) to a major triad. The sonic result is distinctive, readily associated with the pop/jazz repe
from around 1925. It is unrelated to Rameau's "Grande Sixte" (a.k.a. "ii6/5"), although the two share the same son
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24 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM
SO IS IT DORIAN?
A judicious summary of the Davis solo must concur that it is initially suggestive
Dorian. Fastidiously so. But thereafter and overall until the ending, the C - G and D> - A
framings, a veritable 5th leitmotif for Davis, impose something more formatively urge
on the proceedings. Unresolved supertonic functions seem to guide things; plain o
major lurks imposingly in the background as prevailing tonal frame. Whatever Davis ma
have conceived as guiding tonal images before and during his playing, the musical p
uct - once past his first two phrases - is most accurately described as alternating betwe
patternings within C and D>. The extended melismas that outline C and /> major tr
(mm. 30-38, 47-50, 55-60) contradict any global centrality for D or 3 that may b
projected by his solo's beginning and ending phrases. So here, as in many plainso
tunes, there's a bit of tension between initium, finalis, and what comes in the mid
I find this an instructive case of conceptual and perceptual dissonance for a num
of reasons. Improvising artists may well predetermine that their playing shall be limite
the collection d, e,f, g,ab,c (and alternately &fgd>b>cd>\ but this can't ensure th
D and 3 Dorian will ensue as actualized hierarchies. It takes more than pitch content
So What the sense of a prevailing D nucleus - projected octave divisions (authent
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ON MILES AND THE MODES 25
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26 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM
Dn E-flat 11
. . .the sextet followed a preset sequence of five modes. Each mode served
as the harmonic guide for improvisation as long as a soloist wanted to use it
Then, whenever he wanted a change, he moved to the next mode. . .In fact, most
soloists used each mode for four measures and then moved to the next.27
26Copy material in the original Columbia LP album suffered an unfortunate title-switch between A
and a piece called Flamenco Sketches. While writing this chapter I learned that some of my jazz friends
many years played a piece erroneously called All Blues which, according to the Bill Evans's notes on the
Columbia recording, is Flamenco Sketches. For correct matching of names and music, Flamenco Sketch
a medium-tempo six-eight, All Blues in an extremely slow four. The error was enormously compounded
book of pop tune chord changes (a "fake" book) entitled The Real Book (space disallows explanation of t
here) was published carrying the incorrect designation. (The Real Book, The Realbook Press, Syosset NY
["totally revised ed."l, p. 13.)
27Gridley, 219. My reader who knows jazz history will note the influence of Ornette Coleman in this seren
plan. In his record jacket notes, Bill Evans refers to "series of five scales," these "to be played as long as the
wishes until he completed the series [of 51."
™Ibid., 221. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz gives two outlines that differ in details from Gridley's a
themselves mutually contradictory. In that source's Miles Davis entry we read that the piece (misnamed F
Sketches, remember) "contains choruses of variable length in the form a b c d e" and that "each section is iden
a different scale and tonality . . . (including the dorian and mixolydian)." But in the later entry Forms (273) we are
the form consists of five segments, the first and third of which are "... in static major keys, which some anal
preferred to call the ionian mode, and the second and fifth suggest others of the ecclesiastical modes. The fourth se
on the other hand, is based on a flamenco-like scale (D E^ Ft G A Bl» C/Ct ) . . . "
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ON MILES AND THE MODES 27
fj ♦ • * "
1^ ,\.
D Phrygian G Aeolian
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28 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM
ljH>pn I- I I' ^ ^
Ill'1 I I'JJJiJ^I^I'i i U
20 ^
Follo
(Ionia
else f
Davis
on hi
then
easy
Gee.)
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ON MILES AND THE MODES 29
29In which case Davis emphasizes the 9th and major 7th of C major throughout this solo. Reasonable or
not, the line he plays is inconceivable as the projection of a C tonic (or finalisl).
•*°The goal of his move to New York City in 1944 was to seek out and perform with Charlie Parker, not
to attend Juilliard or the School of the Arts.
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30 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM
w V*-T T*^~
Is this tun
numerous
*C pattern
some contr
it all as en
Since our l
questions,
say probab
major, giv
Phrygian
find highly
of rather l
3lIf I may be
as mat condit
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ON MILES AND THE MODES 3 1
^ ♦ rj ~_
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32 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM
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