Paul Magnussen -> RE: Music Theory: Why? (Feb. 3 2015 19:23:09)
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quote:
Just the falsetas require the understanding of phrygian as tonic before getting into the tricky secondary dominants of the voice and guitar interplay, which was quite ornate despite the basic underlying fandango form. Infact just that..."fandango form", flies in the face directly with tonal harmony theory This seems to me, if not a mis-statement, then a misdirection. Modes, include the Phrygian, were understood perfectly well by Renaissance musicians such as Thomas Tallis, and by folk musicians without, of course, a formal musical education. As far as I can see, the disaster struck some time in the 19th century (or at any rate after the major and minor scales had coagulated), when everything before (say) Haydn was dismissed as primitive stuff not worth bothering about. Bert “A.L.” Lloyd (in Folk Song in England,) quotes some classical musician as asking how folk-singers can possibly be using modes, when even the best classical musicians know nothing about them. The question, of course, reveals more about the education of classical musicians of that time than it does about folk-singers; and the subsequent revival of interest doesn’t seem to have been enough to repair the damage. Of course, there were composers such as Bartok and Vaughan Williams who loved both Folk Music and Early Music (as evinced by the latter’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis). But they don’t seem to have been writing the textbooks, in 1910 at any rate.
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