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Miles Davis made the best-selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue, under the influence of George Russell's 'Lydian chromatic concept' of harmony. But what's that?
Miles, a man of few but well-chosen words, summarized it by saying “F should be where C is on the piano”.
Huh? You have to unpack that.
If you play the white notes on the piano, going up, you get 7 different scales depending on where you start. If you start at C you get the familiar major scale - also called the Ionian mode. But if you start at F you get the Lydian mode. And there's an objective sense in which Lydian is unique among all the 7 modes. Check out the chart!
What's going on here?
We can get all 7 modes, now all starting at the same note, by taking Lydian and lowering more and more notes by a half-tone following the pattern in this chart. The notes become 'flat'.
Each time we lower another half-tone, the scale becomes 'darker' - not exactly more sad, but something sort of like that. So Lydian is the 'brightest' scale, and Ionian - our friend the major scale - is just the second brightest.
There's a lot more to say about this! I started here:
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2023/08/08/modes-part-6/
In this article I point out *two* objectively special features of the Lydian mode! But I leave as a puzzle for you to figure out how they're connected. I'll give the answer in my next article.
When @mdreid told me about this connection, and I saw the consequences, my mind was blown. All of a sudden harmony theory seemed a lot less arbitrary - more mathematically beautiful! WHY HAD NOBODY TOLD ME THIS STUFF SOONER?
Found this video of a song in Locrian, an old english folk song "Dust to Dust"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nvTz4JSSqk
@johncarlosbaez @mdreid @androcat I went hunting for the Locrian mode in Hindustani khayal music (north Indian art music), which uses a variety of different modes.
The building block of khayal music is a raga, which is, roughly speaking, a melodic template. Often the template (raga) prescribes a particular mode (thaat), but there are many ragas that mix modes or use non-standard modes. Locrian is not one of the standard modes.
There is a very popular raga, called raga malkauns, that is technically in Locrian mode. But is a pentatonic raga, involving only the notes 1, 3♭, 4♭, 6♭, 7♭ (where the unadorned numbers refer to the Lydian scale), so it is also (technically) in the Phrygian and Aeolian scale. In khayal music theory, it is classified under the Phrygian mode (bhairavi thaat).
Nevertheless, I did find a raga that uses the full Locrian scale: raga lalit-bilas. From the name, it seems like it is a mixture of raga lalit and raga bilaskhani todi, two fairly standard ragas. But the raga lalit-bilas itself is quite uncommon. It is listed with a recording of a performance on https://oceanofragas.com/. I am attaching the audio.
@locallytrivial - Thanks - that's very beautiful. It sounds a bit mournful, perhaps, but not at all awkward! Western musicians often say it's tough to write in Locrian because it's lacking the perfect 5th and the leading-tone, two engines of Western harmony. But this raga lalit-bilas is doing something utterly different, and succeeding nicely.