Major Mode / Melodic Structure

Tonal music (tonality) presents two modes: the major mode, and the minor mode.

Each one of them recognizes twelve transpositions (for each one the twelve sounds of the system), from wich comes tonalities (not the same as scales).

This way, we find 24 tonalities (twelve majors, and twelve minors).

All major tonalities present the same structure; and the same happens with the minor tonalities.

This time, we're going to be analyzing the major mode. First, I'm going to use C Major as reference.

As we can see in the image, we find the semitone in two places:

Between E and F, and between B and C.

First, we find what is known in spanish as sensible modal (I think we could call it modal leading tone in english) which is the third degree of a major tonality.

In this case, it's F.

Second, we find the semitone again, this time between B and C.

The seventh degree of a major tonality is the Leading Tone.

In some spanish harmony books, we can see it as sensible tonal.

In english, we could call it Tonal Leading Tone. But it's simply called Leading Tone.

In music, we use the term degree to refer to each one of the sound of a tonality or a scale.

Each of these degrees has a specific name:

Below, we can see the C Major structure with its respective degrees.

So, if we abstract from the tonality we are in (in this case, C Major) we have the following structure:

As mentioned previously, all the major tonalities share the same structure, so if we apply it over any other note, we'll get its major mode.

For instance: if we apply it on F, we'll get the F Major tonality.

In this case, we find an alteration, that is B flat, because, as we saw previously, the distance between III and IV is a semitone.

If we had B natural instead of B flat, the major mode structure would break. In that case, we would no longer be in F major.

In that case, we would have the Lydian Mode, one of the seven greek modes, topic for a future chapter.

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