A redditor explains how modes work as a musician

As a lifelong musician with a degree in music and a heavy emphasis on composition, modes are something that I'd never felt I had a confident grasp perceiving or applying in my music.

Recordings famous for their modal innovations - such as Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' - felt like they were going over my head. The music was plainly beautiful, but an intuitive understanding of it's innovations and what made it stand out from its' contemporaries is something that I still don't fully hear, despite having a technical understanding. This record was 60 years ago, so my hunch has always been that it's innovations have been thoroughly integrated into popular music in such a way as to seem unremarkable to anyone who grew up with contemporary music.

Like growing up with a heliocentric perception of the universe instead of one in which the Earth is the center of the universe. It's hard, having been born into that understanding, to see why anyone could ever think of the Earth as the center. I have trouble flipping my perception.

Since then musicians like James Brown have boiled their songs down to a single tonal center with no chord changes. This idiom in turn became a foundation for hip-hop, which commonly skips harmonic movement in favor of "flat", modal-sounding, tonality (no harmonic progressions).

Curiously, we're in a period of western popular music in which I perceive a 50/50 split between those who write in a modal style with no harmonic movement - think hip-hop and James Brown style funk - and those whose writing style is based on a more harmonically-propelled framework - think The Beatles or jazz standards based on showtunes.

That said, the author of the linked response has done a tremendous job of explaining how to better orient your thinking towards modal music and has inspired me to approach it again and work towards a stronger grasp.

This is great! I remember studying modes in theory class, and even being given examples, and thinking, "Um, yeah, I guess it's slightly different. I don't get when I would use this." It's not that my teachers didn't convey the same information as this post. It's that the way the conveyed it, I never got it. But this explanation really makes it make sense for me. Now I want to try it out again and see if I can make something sensible out of it!

I find this somewhat misleading. Let's consult the literature.

Mode (from Lat. modus: 'measure', 'standard'; 'manner', 'way'). A term in Western music theory with three main applications: […] the relationship between the note values [lengths] longa and brevis in late medieval notation; interval, in early medieval theory; and, most significantly, a concept involving scale type and melody type. The term 'mode' has always been used to designate classes of melodies, and since the 20th century to designate certain kinds of norm or model for composition or improvisation as well.

[…]

It is essential to distinguish between 'mode' as a concept in the history and theory of European music and 'mode' as a modern musicological concept applied to non-Western music, though the latter naturally grew out of the former.

[…]

But since the 20th century the use of the term 'mode' in English has been broadened to the extent that melodic type and motivic features are now given equal weight with scale type in musicological parlance.

[…]

Mode is essentially a question of the internal relationships of notes within a scale, especially of the predominance of one of them over the others as a tonic […].

Key (i). In tonal music, the abstract arrangement of musical phenomena such as melodies, harmonies and cadences around a referential or tonic pitch class. While the French ton and the German Tonart stress the importance of the tonic, the English term has a broader meaning: as a metaphorical 'key', the tonic 'unlocks' or clarifies the arrangement of pitch relations that underlies the music. A tonic thus unifies and coordinates the musical phenomena within its reach: in the key of C major, for example, there is an essential 'C-ness' to the music.

[…]

Also crucial to the concept of key is the idea that there are two basic modal genera, major and minor, each with different musical characteristics arising largely from the disposition of tones and semitones within their respective scales.

― The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

So key is a property of tonal music. It describes harmonic structure like how cadences behave and melodies are likely to end on the tonic.

(I was going to criticize "it's in the Key of C, Major version" because the concept of key includes its major- or minor-ness, but it appears that a minority (hah) of definitions don't necessarily include a mode; and anyway if you wrote "the key of C" meaning "ambiguously major or minor" no one would bat an eye.)

But modes are not arrangements of a pitch set, and are much more than scale formulas. They include concepts of center, of melodic contour, and arguably of harmony.

People use "mode" to describe almost any melodically well-structured piece, including non-Western ones. For instance, I might cautiously translate raga as "mode" (but normally would write raga because it's more descriptive).

So this: 'a non-diatonic set of notes can be rotated as well (as can diatonic subsets like the Pentatonic Scale), and thus can have modes as well' is misleading at best. A set of notes doesn't "have" modes; a mode is an emergent or constructive property of a piece, which includes a scale formula.

And this: 'a Key is not a scale or mode. It's a "concept". A "Key" is an "establishment of a Center" - a "Key Center" or "Tonal Center" if you like' is not a meaningful distinction because modes also establish "centers" or "tonics".

In the end, I think it's very confusing to contrast "music based on keys" with "music based on modes", because they are related concepts.

(Also I bristled a little at "you're over-thinking it". The New Grove entry "mode" is almost 100 pages long.)