Social History Template: Fill & Download for Free

From memory - and I was taught this approximately… dear God almighty was it really nearly 40 years ago? - the overriding emotion was a kind of “Oh? Really? That’s interesting.”We weren’t taught it as military history (“Alas! We are defeeeeeeeeated!”) but rather from the perspective of different philosophies of government; it was bundled up with the French Revolution and the efforts of ‘enlightened despots’ in Russia and Prussia and possibly other places ending in ‘-ussia’.It was, in fact, held up to us as an example of a ‘good’ revolution, in that it involved no reign of terror and ended in what would eventually become the template for a lot of modern democracies.In short, then, we felt rather as though it were a major political event, with important ramifications not clear at the time, which happened about 200 years before we were born. Like most kids, we’d really rather have been playing football/Dungeons & Dragons/the guitar/ doctors and nurses with the girls at the school over the road.We paid attention, though, because (a) Beaky Ward was a bloody good teacher and (b) it was a lot more fun than the miserable social history of the Industrial Revolution.

You’ve heard other answers that talk about scale-wise playing, and so far as it goes, they and you are right. It’s the same notes.But even then a particular melody does have an implied home base.You can start on a white key on the piano and play a scale without any black keys. Starting on A gives you the natural minor scale (which is the Aeolian mode) and starting on C gives you the major scale (which is the Ionian mode). Starting on any other white key (B, D, E, F, or G) gives you the modes. If you have a mode and want to change keys, you have the template to know the scale degrees within the mode of choice.For folks who need a little recap, here are all the Western modes (sometimes called the church modes, but “church modes” are often thought of as another scheme with weird terms like Hypodorian. I don’t know much about that end of it). Play upward on all white keys starting and ending on:C - IonianD - DorianE - PhrygianF - LydianG - MixolydianA - AeolianB - LocrianThus, if you want to put something in the key of F-Dorian, then it should have 3 flats. (Straight F-minor would have 4.)More interesting than the mode itself is the characters of the keys if you play around in them for a while. I’ll use cliches and broad generalizations here, so don’t shoot me.D - Dorian: Renaissance sound, but also a cool jazz sound. It won't sound jazzy like big-band or 20s jazz, but it'll give you that Miles Davis "Kind of Blue" mood. Also, see Santana.E - Phrygian: Distinctly Spanish sounding. You hear it a lot with guitarists, because E is a great key to fart around in by leaving the E-strings open and scooting up just one fret to an F, and back and forth. Flamenco!F - Lydian: Instantly recognizable as "wonder" music from movies. Any time you get kid actors together with John Williams, you've got Lydian mode. It's also, for classical composers, a go-to way of making a major key sound modern. You hear it all the time in new operas by Jake Heggie and Donald Hagen.G - Mixolydian: more Renaissance, this time the major version. The second of my two examples up top there, in 6/8, gives you Mixolydian in a nutshell. You hear it all the time (with a few blue notes in there) in the Ray Charles era. Rock bands, especially the Beatles and other Brit bands, used it a lot. "You Really Got Me," "Norwegian Wood."A - Aeolian: it's pretty much straight minor, but without any sharp sevens added in it gets a natural minor sound that suits rock-n-roll. Anything in a minor key in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s was probably really Aeolian. (Contrast that with late 90s pop by Britney Spears or Backstreet Boys, who stuck those sharp sevens in like crazy. Really sounded unusual at the time.)B - Locrian: I can't think of any real uses of this mode outside of very obscure death metal, and even then my ear wants to resolve it to some other more stable-sounding tonality. As a separate tonality, Locrian gets a "Participant" ribbon. Jazzers use the locrian scale, though, when playing the iiº in a iiº - V7 - i progression.A terminology note, though: we use the word "mode" to refer specifically to the use of a conventional Western diatonic scale starting from different points. That is, each mode has two half-tones separating a set of two and three whole tones, respectively. (It's easy to see on the piano keyboard, because whole tones have a black key wedged between them.)So, no matter which mode you're in — Dorian (WHWWWHW) or Mixolydian (WWHWWHW) — that pattern pertains. (And that’s part of the reasoning behind the original question here.) In fact, you could express the different modes like this:Ionian WWHWWWH Dorian WHWWWHW Phrygian HWWWHWW Lydian WWWHWWH Mixolydian WWHWWHW Aeolian WHWWHWW Locrian HWWHWWW Notice the order of whole steps and half steps never changes: just the starting and ending spot. If you squint your eyes, you can even see the pattern of the piano keyboard implicit there.I'm endlessly fascinated with this stuff, the strange alchemy of science and perception and social history all rolled up.

It takes all sorts to make the world go round. This kind of speculation requires too much mind-reading and every view (including mine) will be refracted by the ethnic/social/cultural lenses of the biases we have absorbed/evolved through our own life experiences. Women are, traditionally, perceived as nurturing and maternal. The historial template of a conventional family consisting of a loving and caring parent of each gender has long been challenged usually in self-serving justification by those who choose alternative life arrangements - not that there’s anything wrong with that. The alternative situation where a male person may want to be a loving and nurturing parent to children but without the need or presence of a wife or female partner raises the same question. So, in the absence of a more enlightened insight, each to their own and, at all times, the needs of the child for love, care, respect and protection from the world and its potential dangers should be paramount. Children are not playthings or ornaments to embellish anyone;s life for their own selfish or cosmetic needs.