They used the modal scales and odd meters of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Since the 1930's, jazz musicians had been exploiting such modernist ideas as chromatic harmony, modal scales and electronics.
He sometimes introduces modal scales and polar harmonic goals between which the music oscillates.
Both are concerned with faith and survival struggles and have lyrics phrased in Biblical allusions; both draw on modal scales and melismatic vocal lines that can sound Middle Eastern.
Mr. Susa adopts the recognizable musical language of his American contemporaries: firmly tonal yet modified by modal scales and given to periodic drifts into harmonic friction.
Some were akin to amiable Celtic jigs and reels; others, from Basque traditions, were built on stark modal scales and a six-beat pulse, with stuttering notes and sudden bursts of speed.
What resulted — the foursquare metric layouts, the soft cadences and melodic quirks of ancient modal scales and a rosy-cheeked bluffness and self-satisfaction — was in one sense an "authentic" past.
In the new realm, he could explore the technical limits of his musical language, which is based on an intricate array of Russian modal scales, and also test the psychological limits of his narratives, in which seemingly simple and innocent ideas are revealed as their opposites.
The mazurkas often show more folk features than many of his other works, sometimes including modal scales and harmonies and the use of drone basses.
Plenty of Arab artists over the years have merged Western-style musical elements with Arabic modal scales and traditional rhythms; bands that accompany dabke dancing routinely get the party started with drum machines and keyboards set to resemble traditional instruments like the mijwiz and arghul.
