Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Pedagogy Study Group

Questions surrounding the concept of mode and modal theory have plagued scholarly discourse since Harold S. Power’s 1980 controversial essay for the New Grove Dictionary of Music (Powers 1981, 1982, 1992, 1998). Wiering, et al. provided revisions and additional scholarship for the 2001 update of Powers’s article, seeking to reconcile the problematic nature of the topic. Dividing the concept of mode by terminology, medieval modal theory, modal theories and polyphonic music, modal scales and traditional music, and its implications in the Middle East and Asia, the authors of the 2001 Oxford Music Online article have not redressed the contentious topic in nearly twenty-two years.

In the case of the music history classroom, the fundamental issues surrounding Western conceptions of mode have not been redressed for almost 63 years. Published in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Grout, Palisca, and J. Peter Burkholder’s (1960, 1973, 1980, 1988, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2014, 2019) A History of Western Music and Taruskin’s six-volume Oxford History of Western Music (2005) omit the problematic nature of mode. Instead, each author provides their intellectual history and narrative concerning the musical system of the ancient Greeks, a record that jumps from the heritage of the ancient Greeks directly to Byzantium, i.e., binding the term mode with the eight ecclesiastical modes. This begs one to consider: Why does this lacuna persist in the current strategies of music history pedagogy?

Drawing upon the work of Swift (2013) and Walker (2020), my study aims to move towards a decolonized presentation of mode in the music history classroom. I will (1) identify a brief problematic timeline between classical Greece and the early Christian church, (2) provide a concise alternative case study and timeline of the Arabian musical influence on mode in the North Indian subcontinent as early as the eighth century CE, and (3) present potential strategies for creating a broader conceptual framework of mode through the lens of Hindustani rāga. I draw upon a synthesis of musicological, ethnomusicological, and theoretical perspectives espoused by Powers (1958, 1976, 1992), Wade (1979), Raja (2005), and Jairazbhoy (2008), Neuman (2012), and McNeill (2017) in moving towards a decolonized theory of mode. Going beyond Western reductionism of the mode-concept lies at the heart of a necessary ontological turn; I argue that a deeper understanding of mode is essential in laying sufficiently secure foundations for overhauling musicological and theoretical standard-issue music curricula.