The Mysteries of Middle C
Every day when I pick up the flute, it’s a new adventure… even if it’s a return to the basics. The farther afield I go—with odd pentatonics, bebop variations, or tritone substitutions—the more I turn back to the middle, F and G and simpler still, everything locked within the holographic mystery of the C Major diatonic scale.
Not only central in the piano (but a half-step above the middle of the musical staff lines, B), middle C I understand is a common midrange for the human voice. I don’t know about the guitar, but on the silver flute the notes of C are the easiest to play. Note for note, that is. But to situate the C between the two octaves makes it relatively difficult to play C Major. Even if you become skilled at navigating the jump from the lower to the higher register, with fingering wrinkles and mouth adjustments, C Major on the flute still lacks the underpinning of lower notes, unless your instrument is equipped with the small concession of an extra foot with B or at most, Bb.
Which gets us into modes. Resolving at more central points in the C scale provides more melodic balance and makes melodies easier to play. It also introduces a variety of flavors to explore, outside of the ambit of the major.
Exploring each mode in turn is a fun journey, more diverse yet when introducing variant sharps and flats. But what about playing with others?
Unless the tune (think Irish pennywhistle) sticks within a primary mode (often Dorian or Mixolydian in that case), we’re into the domain of popular songwriting, following chord progressions in a set arrangement. Coincidentally enough, those changes generally match a set of modes of the root major.
Thus, the ii-V-I jazz progression means the melody moves from D Dorian to G Dominant to C Major. In simplest terms of melody, the flute plays from the modal scale of that chord, or perhaps just some of the chord notes, or most simply, the single note itself: D, G, C.
Another way to track the ii-V-I progression (D Dorian, G Dominant, C Major) is with the movement of the 3 in each scale: from F to B to E. Interesting to note, the F to B interval is a tritone, unstable but then resolving in the interval of a fifth from B back down to E.
If we track instead the movement of the root notes (1) in those scales, we go from D to G (a fourth), then back down from G to C (a fifth): again, representing a less stable pairing (the fourth) resolving to the more satisfying fifth.
What happens if we introduce the complexity of a tritone substitution: instead of the G7 chord, using the Dominant scale a tritone away on the circle of fifths, namely Db7? Let’s see how the primary chord notes (bold) line up, along with other scale notes that align with them:
The characteristic “guide tones” of a scale being the 3 and 7, we see the strongest correspondence here at notes B and F. The oddball Db7 scale fits there but needs some nudging to line up with the other notes. Therefore throwing in the alterations b5 (at G) and b9 (at D) helps tie all four scales together. We could do the same for the G7 scale to provide more flexibility and variation linking it to its tritone partner, the Db7.
What if we wanted to distill an essential pentatonic scale to represent all of the above?
A further cataloguing of those modes would give the following traditional modes:
5: Mixolydian pentatonic; 4: Raga Shri Kalyan; 2: Raga Chandrakauns; 1: Raga Desh.
(Hat tip, as usual, to the indispensable Amazing Scale Finder).