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Modal Music Composition: Expanded Edition
* This edition has been replaced by the 3rd Edition* Modal Music Edition serves as a reference work unlikely to be superseded and also as a source of fresh ideas for composers and songwriters looking to use modal music as a true alternative to the tonal system. Only a modest knowledge of traditional (tonal) harmony and forms is necessary. No knowledge of modal music is assumed. Numerous examples and tables provide important information in easy-to-use form. Three more chapters and 40 more music examples have been added to this new edition. Three extended study compositions illustrate the procedures more vividly than standard examples. The 3 study compositions and examples are recorded on the included audio CD. This book, therefore, fills the need by composers and songwriters alike for a comprehensive description and analysis of the melodic and harmonic characteristics of the modal scales and their interrelations. Although composers have often used modal passages, it is acknowledged that the modal scales have less harmonic stability than the still predominant major-minor scales. To remedy this, Dr. Cormier has taken a fresh look at the modal scales and developed a systematic set of procedures that can maintain modal stability while retaining their special character
Paperback
Published August 21, 2006
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June 19, 2015
A very dry and encyclopedic book. Dr. Cormier is not a professional musicologist, but I had high hopes for him initially. Still, he did not deliver. A bulk of the book is devoted to repetitively listing features of the different modes, with few comments and helpful advice into how a composer can incorporate them into a composition. Cormier's central idea, that we can group six of the modes (all except Locrian) into three modal pairings or dyads (i.e., Ionian - Aeolian, Lydian - Dorian, and Mixolydian-Phrygian), analogous to the major-minor pairing in traditional harmony, is a very interesting one. But even poring over the separate chapters he devotes to each dyad, there is little musical insight and advice offered. Instead we just get more and more dry, repetitive descriptions with few convincing musical examples. There are a lot of short musical passages in the book that are actually recorded in the CD, but majority of these are just monotonic chord progressions. It would have been much more helpful if Cormier had found or composed examples where the chord progressions are used in short passages of actual music.
Composing musical examples is indeed something Cormier does try to do in the second part of the book, where there is a full-length "study composition" for each of the modal dyad chapters. Listening to each of them however, it becomes really apparent that Cormier is not a very good composer. He is articulate in describing what happens in the compositions, but they themselves make little aural sense. Without the descriptions, the music simply sounds weird, disjunct, and ambiguous. His choice of scoring the compositions for a choir of clarinet-family instruments, which he claims is to prevent timbre and texture to affect our understanding of how the modes work, actually detracts from the appreciation of the examples themselves. The "study compositions" become incomprehensible, boring, and dry, and require gargantuan willpower for one to keep studying them earnestly.
Besides these weaknesses, Cormier also has a tendency to sound very verbose, with constant name-dropping of famous musical trends, figures, and styles, perhaps in an attempt to show his erudition despite him not being a professional scholar. This, however, only bogs down the book. A good book on music is always well-served by quotations of actual musical works whenever something is being discussed, and these are very rare. This would be a much better book if it is converted from a dry text to workbook-style. Trim down the paragraphs on historical context, condense the repetitive features of the modes into tables, and add in more actual CONTENT of how to compose modal music.
In the end, I felt that I learned very little of how to write modal music by reading this book. I did learn about Cormier's interesting idea of the modal dyads, but I believe that it is up to me to develop them on my own, because Cormier himself doesn't seem to have succeeded in creating a coherent compositional language using that idea.
Composing musical examples is indeed something Cormier does try to do in the second part of the book, where there is a full-length "study composition" for each of the modal dyad chapters. Listening to each of them however, it becomes really apparent that Cormier is not a very good composer. He is articulate in describing what happens in the compositions, but they themselves make little aural sense. Without the descriptions, the music simply sounds weird, disjunct, and ambiguous. His choice of scoring the compositions for a choir of clarinet-family instruments, which he claims is to prevent timbre and texture to affect our understanding of how the modes work, actually detracts from the appreciation of the examples themselves. The "study compositions" become incomprehensible, boring, and dry, and require gargantuan willpower for one to keep studying them earnestly.
Besides these weaknesses, Cormier also has a tendency to sound very verbose, with constant name-dropping of famous musical trends, figures, and styles, perhaps in an attempt to show his erudition despite him not being a professional scholar. This, however, only bogs down the book. A good book on music is always well-served by quotations of actual musical works whenever something is being discussed, and these are very rare. This would be a much better book if it is converted from a dry text to workbook-style. Trim down the paragraphs on historical context, condense the repetitive features of the modes into tables, and add in more actual CONTENT of how to compose modal music.
In the end, I felt that I learned very little of how to write modal music by reading this book. I did learn about Cormier's interesting idea of the modal dyads, but I believe that it is up to me to develop them on my own, because Cormier himself doesn't seem to have succeeded in creating a coherent compositional language using that idea.
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