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A Simplified Mode Classification for Traditional Anglo-American Song Tunes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2019

Norman Cazden
Norman Cazden*
Affiliation:
University of Maine at Orono, Maine
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Extract

This paper might well be subtitled, Why call it Ionian Heptatonic when we mean Major?

In the rosy romantic image invoked long ago by Chappell and Wooldridge, as also on the European continent by Combarieu, the archaic song of the common people has ever been drawn by instinctive tropism towards the musical forms and formulas taught over the centuries by a benevolent Church. These writers, no more alert than many among their modern successors to the observation that their information necessarily went back ultimately to Church-sponsored sources alone, sensed a natural linkage between melodic mode usages in popular tunes and the theoretical classifications that had been ordained, though retroactively, for the ancient sacred chant, and they took this connection to be symbolic and symptomatic of a profound cultural and psychological impulse.

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Articles
Information
Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council , Volume 3 , 1971 , pp. 45 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 By the International Folk Music Council 

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References

Footnotes

** Save for nos. 1, 3 and 9, the notated examples that follow have been transcribed by the author.Google Scholar

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