THE MODALITY THEORY

The Modality Theory

Introduction

The question of modality is one of the hardest and most interesting of those facing modern musicology, particularly in the analytical musicology itself the task wonder about the deep structure of music. The concept of modality is particularly poorly defined and its scope is not clearly delineated. At a very general level, the modality is what ensures the unity and homogeneity of the works. But this definition should be as well, in the case of Western music, the concept of tonality. Type and tone seem indeed be, to some extent, the phenomena analogues. One might therefore consider that the modality, which takes place in the tone non-European music or pre-tonal. There is, however, that these are very phenomena divers, so much so that one wonders whether it is legitimate to consider them under the guise of single concept.

This issue will not really be considered here, where it will question two specific cultural contexts. The first is that of medieval ecclesiastical chant, Gregorian chant.

The other is the polyphony of the late middle Ages and the Renaissance, which prepared the advent the tone of modern XVII century. It will be seen that these are two quite distinct cases and that have little in common, which seems to legitimize the outset the doubt sometimes.

The neo-Humean view of modality

The neo-humean view of modality suggests that the world is fully based on things that have properties. They are present some way or there other for a reason. Those properties may be related to each other and must be having some sort of significance. No matter how well glued are things, there still are issues in the world of different types. There may be a very specific reason that the things in the world are this way. Things can and cannot co-exist with each other whenever required (Back, 2001).

Concept of modality

The choice of these two examples, of course linked to an obvious concern of musicology. Western culture for its own, however, does not veil the fact that many of the questions in the pages that follow relate to truth as many other cultures and other modalities (Hughes, 2009).

The most forceful defender of the thesis of modality theory is called human supervinience. It is because of this factor that one should tend to be very careful. On the distribution of properties in the mosaic, the modal and its casual and economic facts should be very well agreed by the property based theorist. Those property based theorist have some or other facts related to the nature of the things.

The Human Supervenience thesis instead, claims that all truths supervene on the spatio-temporal distribution of local property instances conceived of as consistent with Independence. For every way things could have been, there must be some concrete world where things are that way. Lewis accomplishes this by stipulation, but it is a stipulation motivated by Independence. The principle of recombination asserts, roughly, that anything can coexist with anything else, and anything can fail to coexist with anything ...