Concepts and Definitions According to Vincent Persichetti, “polymodality involves two or more different modes on the same or different tonal centers. The modal strands may be melodic or harmonic.” In the most traditional conception a melodic line in order to be considered modal, apart from being diatonic to a mode (traditional or synthetic), needs to contain no alterations. This also applies to modal harmonic content. Persichetti states that “a pure modal passage is one in which a modal melody is harmonized with chords from the same mode and on the same tonal center.” In reference to modal jazz, this concept is what Ron Miller has described as modal simple. This notion of harmonic modality is somehow reminiscent …show more content…
Composers and scholars have not agreed on what each term exactly means, and its scope. Perhaps as a result of its wide acceptance, the term polytonality lacks accuracy as a descriptive category.
Béla Bartók’s explanation of both this terms, is one of the most radically different to the rest of composers and scholars. For him, the difference relies in the amount of tonal centers. While polytonality must have two or more tonal centers with identical or different scales, polymodality needs only one tonic and different modes, as he observes
To point out the essential difference between atonality, polytonality, and polymodality in a final word on this subject, we may say that atonal music offers no fundamental tone at all, polytonality offers or is supposed to offer several of them, polymodality offers a single one. Therefore, our music, I mean the new Hungarian art music, is always based on a single fundamental tone, as [much] in its entirety as in its …show more content…
Persichetti combines the terms and states that, “when the same mode occurs simultaneously on different tonal centers, the passage is polytonal and modal, but not polymodal.” He also slightly contradicts himself when he claims that, “when different modes occur on different tonal centers at the same time the passage is both polymodal and polytonal.” The inconsistency relies in that on the previous paragraph, he states that “polymodality involves two or more different modes on the same or different tonal centers.” Another example of the problems in the definition of these concepts, is the remark that Jeremy Drake makes in reference to Milhaud’s music. Being Darius Milhaud one of the most cited examples of polytonality, and considering himself a composer of polytonal music, Drake comments that his theoretical approach to composing was, “a feature that sets him quite apart from his contemporaries. This comes out especially in his researches into polytonality, which might be better called in his case ‘polymodality’, for he almost never used the functional relationships that characterize