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I think the short answer is nomenclature. Much of what makes music theory difficult is that the terms and notation systems have built up over centuries, and the

I think the short answer is nomenclature. Much of what makes music theory difficult is that the terms and notation systems have built up over centuries, and they come from musicians who were concerned with what's useful, not from programmers who understood the math. So pretty much everything has nine different names, and pretty much every term gets used to mean nine different things. That said, for modes, AFAIK the names are all 100% arbitrary and used for historic reasons. For scales with varying numbers of modes, the first thing that jumps to mind is that some scales have modes that are identical to the scale, or to other modes, so references probably leave them out (e.g. consider the modes of the whole tone scale!). But there's probably also cases where this or that mode might get omitted because it whoever wrote the authoritative textbook about that scale thought it sounded awful, or felt it shouldn't be considered a mode for whatever reason. There could be other stuff going on I don't know about - when I was learning this stuff I ignored big swaths of material that didn't seem useful for programmatic music.

viraptor 6y ago
> That said, for modes, AFAIK the names are all 100% arbitrary This annoyed me a lot when learning the basics. One thing I noticed when I experimented with what things would be called without the traditional names is that I would lose the "namespace" of what I'm thinking about. I think the names are awful, but Dorian means something specific, C something specific, etc. You can map it to just numbers like... scale 1 for note 1, mode +1, chord 5 and it may be initially easier to "calculate" the result, but also more confusing. But then you just get used to the names with enough practice. A bit of a Stockholm syndrome. They're still awful, but familiar enough you stop caring.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
One unfortunate dangling problem with the historical nomenclature is this: "scales have modes" This is wrong. A scale is an interval series. A mode is an interval series. There is no difference between them. It just so happens that there are ways to permute some interval series to generate others. Because western music is so focused on the interval series we call the major scale, people noted that you can permute this into a series of other interval series. But none of those interval series (Aeolian, Phrygian, Lydian etc) "own" or are the basis for the others: they are all related by permutation. You could just as easily say "Modes of the Phrygian scale" and you would still be referring to the same set of interval series.
- fenomas 6y ago
  > This is wrong. Modes are (typically) permutations of scales. The fact that a permutation of a scale is also a scale doesn't mean it's wrong to say that scales have permutations.

viraptor 6y ago

> That said, for modes, AFAIK the names are all 100% arbitrary This annoyed me a lot when learning the basics. One thing I noticed when I experimented with what things would be called without the traditional names is that I would lose the "namespace" of what I'm thinking about. I think the names are awful, but Dorian means something specific, C something specific, etc. You can map it to just numbers like... scale 1 for note 1, mode +1, chord 5 and it may be initially easier to "calculate" the result, but also more confusing. But then you just get used to the names with enough practice. A bit of a Stockholm syndrome. They're still awful, but familiar enough you stop caring.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

One unfortunate dangling problem with the historical nomenclature is this: "scales have modes" This is wrong. A scale is an interval series. A mode is an interval series. There is no difference between them. It just so happens that there are ways to permute some interval series to generate others. Because western music is so focused on the interval series we call the major scale, people noted that you can permute this into a series of other interval series. But none of those interval series (Aeolian, Phrygian, Lydian etc) "own" or are the basis for the others: they are all related by permutation. You could just as easily say "Modes of the Phrygian scale" and you would still be referring to the same set of interval series.

fenomas 6y ago
> This is wrong. Modes are (typically) permutations of scales. The fact that a permutation of a scale is also a scale doesn't mean it's wrong to say that scales have permutations.