To be honest, I'd hesitate calling it a modal piece. This gives the piece a decidedly-medieval flair. Medieval music loves them modes-if I recall correctly, medieval music was largely based on nodes, the idea of "counterpoint" (and, more importantly, the introduction of polyphony and harmony on a large scale) not coming into wide existence and usage until somewhere around the 16-17th centuries. That's a big part of the reason we're musicians, after all! Instrumentation is simple-recorders are not really used in modern music anymore, but we know they were used back then, ergo, there's our "historical connection." If I would guess, it's the instrument's relative simplicity, both in construction and in sound, that lend an air of plausibility to it-we can totally imagine some farmer or wandering bard fashioning it out of wood or bone and playing it among the hills and pastures-but, as I said before, this kind of thing is wholly up to the individual to decide what they associate with musical sound. Noturtles does a great job explaining it, take a look at his/her reply, but basically it's this: The FF one sounds "medieval" largely because of two things: instrumentation and modes. Please, feel free to correct any glaring errors on my part!) (Also, I'm no professional music historian, just a pleb with passion and a bit too much free time on his hands. Keep in mind that this kind of music analysis is largely subjective-your idea of "medieval-sounding" can be completely different to mine, or some other person's idea! In my opinion, these pieces sound a little more renaissance than medieval, for various reason which I will explain a bit below. These are the types of tunes that people often identify as having a medieval sound (BTW - Irish musicians often moonlight as renn faire minstrels). Some Celtic players will refer to these tunes as having a shifting tonic, rather than having a chord progression. The default progression when not implied otherwise by the melody is usually VII-i/I (dorian/mixolydian) or sometimes IV-i/I, You rarely hear a V-I cadence. The solution that Irish guitarists/zouk players typically use for harmonizing tunes is to avoid thirds in chords as much as possible (they clash with a lot of melodies) and ignore the root and fifth of a scale when in the melody as a cue to accompanying harmony (i.e., the root/fifth of the scale can legitimately be added to any chord they are treated as drones). If you try to use the notes of strong beats as chord tones you will end up with chord progressions that do not seem to go anywhere, and often you will be forced to change chords at odd times. Older modal tunes often have melodic runs that are very hostile towards functional harmonic accompaniments. In particular, in most newer folk tunes you find chord tones falling on strong beats, in a way that the melody implies a harmony. I am an Irish musician, and the melodic conventions of older tunes in the repertoire are very different from newer tunes. Just to add a bit to the other points here: the sense of melody was very different prior to the regular use of harmony. TL DR The music you gave uses older and smaller instrumentation and the relationship between harmony and melody is different than most music today. It was more common in popular music back then than it is today, where there is usually one voice with chords playing for support (homophony).Īlso, the "tavern" feel comes from the fact that the music requires few people to play, so it would be easy to picture being played in a smaller venue as opposed to a larger concert hall, for example, where you would expect to hear orchestras and the like. The three voices work independently of one another. Your second example is a melody with two lower voices. Your first example is mostly a solo instrument, which is about as minimal of a texture as you can get. Your second example uses recorders, which are no longer very widely used.Īnother big contributor is texture. Your first example is a cello, which is still a common instrument (although there's a harpsichord in the background every now and again, which is not all that common anymore). Actually, the music that you're referring to is more along the lines of Renaissance music.Ī very big part of the sound, however, comes from instrumentation.
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