Daily Study no. 116 for Horn Quartet

[@Iskrittt]

Hi! its me again. Modes are my jam so I had to comment. First I wanted to say that I really like the endings of 115 and 116. They feel incredibly natural and still musically satisfying. Second, yeah Phrygian is tense. b2 + v diminished go crazy. My solution for that is often let the melody lead the tension and release while letting the harmony stick to chords/steps in thirds to support said melody and keep it rooted at the root note. Also (you probably already know this) when all else fails, pedal your tonic note in the base. Listener can't hear anything else as tonic if you don't let them :) Staring at the notation and listening too hard for what i feel as the tonic, I think I'm feeling mostly F# Aeolian. My best guess for that is the first held note being supported supported both by the start of the next portion of melody and the fifth in the chord in the bass makes that pull really strong. Also the B never gets a complete chance to be the tonic due to its changing third and relatively small importance in the melody, so it ends up just being the other fifth away from the F#, making that resolution even stronger. I think the closest you get to leaving that would be measure 17 (the first measure after the second 2/4) and the very end, where I am almost hearing C# Phrygian. Resolving the D natural down to the C# with a supporting chord would definitely lock you there if you wanted it, and the instance you have on the C# held note at the end kind of forces my ear to be like "fine, its the tonic", which is aided by the fact that it had come from F# tonic (fifth away) and a held G# (the other fifth) Overall though, I feel that resolution points are very important when writing modally. The B does and can feel strong due to its high presence in the bass, but without a melodic resolution with it (at least to my ear which i consider a miracle to have passed aural skills) it never really gets to shine as a true tonic. C# gets a lot closer thanks to being the start of the melody and the things mentioned above, but again I think that F# kinda steals the show here. Again, take everything I said as just a suggestion, and I could talk about modes all day, AND I still really love this piece. You're great!

[@calvindvorsky]

Thank you! I really appreciate your insight, and now I'm starting to hear F# as the root too, especially for the last melody. It makes the modal switching go between Aeolian and Dorian, which seems more intuitive than switching Dorian and Mixolydian, since the 3rd stays constant (despite the fact that I rarely even used the note A). Though, I do still think that if the 2nd horn had resolved back to B at the end, it would feel like the tonic. Earlier in the piece, though, when the melody rises to F# in measure 8, I very clearly hear that as "moving to iv in C#", rather than a resolution. My brain seems to want to hear that as "melody developing away from the tonic harmony", even if the backgrounds didn't change. Maybe this is just be my ear being biased by the thought process I used while writing it. At the end of the day, I think that this shows how this study has no clear fundamental. My design was a C# melody over a B backdrop, so your ear splitting the difference at F# seems like a logical compromise. I find it endlessly interesting that we have different interpretations. It's kinda like another one of those "emergent properties" I've mentioned before. Perhaps here, the listener's dispositions to harmony can result in entirely different experiences, based on how they try to "settle" the ambiguous harmony. I wonder what note someone with little experience with modes would pick as the root, for instance. If someone were to pick, say, the most common note, I think that would actually be E, thanks to the third horn part. On a surface level, the constancy of that E seems comparable to what you said about using a pedal tonic, yet I don't hear it as the root at all. As for the endings to this one and yesterday's, I'm very glad you like them! I had to fight my habits quite a lot to avoid doing fermata endings again, this study especially. I think the mysterious and unresolved ending actually works well as a thematic parallel to the modal ambiguity, especially since it ends with the slightly more tense D#, rather than a D natural. As for yesterday's, the main reason I included that staccato layer was so that I could use it for the ending, lol.