TONALITY Vs. MODALITY
I am creating a fundamentals of music theory course for my students and am struggling to properly categorize the concepts of Tonaliy and Modality. Intuitively, Tonality has to do with the hierarchy of pitch relationships (there's a tonal center vs. pantonal or atonal music where there isn't one). Modality has to do with the organization of the 7 tones of the diatonic scales which leads to the Major and Minor modes (and of course, the church modes Dorian, Phrygian, etc.). So, in a sense, modality is a subset of tonality in that all modes have a tonal center (although some modes may have stronger tonal centers than other ones).
I have seen other definitions and categorizations, some even by some of the great music educators (Edwin Gordon et. al), that go something like: Tonality describes whether a piece is in major or minor and Modality describes whether a piece is in a particular church mode.
I am quite dissatisfied with this description. Major and Minor are in fact, modes. (Although the harmonic minor and melodic minor are an altered form of the Aeolian). I feel that this separation of the two concepts of modality and tonality to describe church modes vs. major-minor is not only unnecessary and illogical, but also quite confusing.
Thoughts?
Submitted May 13, 2021 at 11:11PM by Outrageous-Invite406 https://www.reddit.com/r/Learnmusic/comments/nbxw0t/modal_vs_tonal/?utm_source=ifttt