Modal harmony

Last month, we had a look at the basic inner workings of tonal harmony and how chord progressions actually progress. In this issue’s Easy Guide, we’re going to examine a different approach: modal harmony.

In contrast to tonal harmony, where there’s a definite hierarchy of chord types, with the tonic at the top, followed by dominant and then predominant chords, when dealing with modal harmony, this hierarchy goes out the window, as there’s no such harmonic function involved. We saw last time how tonal music mainly uses just major or minor keys, also known in ‘mode speak’ as the Ionian or Aeolian modes. In contrast, modal music doesn’t just exploit major and minor keys, it uses all of the seven available