ORCID

0009-0007-0979-2445

Keywords

Music Theory, Diatonic Modes, Pedagogy, Curriculum

Abstract

Undergraduate music students in their junior and senior years have a solid foundation in music fundamentals based on the four-semester music theory sequence taken during their sophomore and junior years, but most have a weakness in the area of diatonic modes. This is not to say that they are unaware of the modes or that they do not understand how to identify or construct them, but rather that students are unable to conceptualize modality in a pre-tonal context. To the modern undergraduate music student, the modes blossomed out of the major scale—a notion counter to historical truth. This backwards way of thinking causes students to view all music through a tonal lens, even if that music was composed before tonality was even conceptualized. In this thesis, I demonstrate the importance of teaching undergraduate music students the diatonic modes in a historical manner, highlight the lack thereof in modern curricula, and provide a possible solution. In Chapter 1, I categorize the various methods of teaching the diatonic modes and analyze various theorists’ explanations of the modes through pre-tonal history to see which of these methods they utilized. In Chapter 2, I provide a literature review of a plethora of music theory textbooks with published dates ranging from mid-20th Century through 2024, focusing on which methods they use to introduce the diatonic modes. Finally, in Chapter 3, I provide the curriculum I developed and taught to a Music Theory I course with the intention of providing students with a more historical understanding of the diatonic modes.

Completion Date

2025

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Ayers, William

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

Music

Identifier

DP0029384

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

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