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A friend of mine, who runs his own guitar teaching channel in YouTube, recently uploaded a video about modal and tonal music. Well, he really focused on the modal thing, because "we all know what tonal music is" ;)
The YouTube video (in Spanish)
At the end of the video he talks about a list of tunes that anyone into modal music should check, including Cantaloupe Island, one of the most known compositions of Herbie Hancock. He throws a question and invites the listener to try to think about why Mr Hancock chose those chords. The harmony goes something like this (each chord lasts four bars): F-7(11) | Db7(#11) | D-7(11) | F-7(11)
Of course, there is no right answer we can give.... We should ask the composer directly to know the real reason! But it made me think about it a bit.
At first I started thinking about possible tonal relationships, trying to figure out possible functions. It's easy to think of the F-7(11) as a Dorian one, the D7(#11) as the sub tritone of the secondary dominant of the six, etc. But hey: it's a modal tune, that's exactly the opposite paradigm.
After that, I started thinking just about tension and release. You know: you have that dorian - bluesy color on the one, then the magical tension of the lydian dominant, some release on the D-7 and then, there's kind of a reset in the last four measures, because the rhythm changes. It's not like a B section, but it's not a turnaround.
And speaking of turnarounds: the composition is somehow.... like a funky blues? It's four bars longer and doesn't follow the form, but the improvisational feel is similar: three main colors with plenty of room to develop into a vamp. The main melody has a pentatonic flavor that accentuates it.
My response, as a person who writes music, is that in modal melodies you look for “refreshment” when there is a change. You want different accidentals, even if it's the same type of chord. That way the change becomes interesting and somehow engages the listener. It is relevant to analyze which intervals are preserved and which ones we are going to color with. At the level of which tones to choose, there is always the consideration of thinking about which are going to be the main instruments, so that there is a certain comfort in improvisation.
My friend's response was that, often in modal themes, the foundation is a sequence of chords in the same species with a fixed transposition. In that sense, we have D-7 and F-7 and would consider Db7#11 as its relative two: Ab-7. D-7 F-7 and Ab-7: three minor chords at a distance of minor third, a classic scheme. He told me a bit about “twoing the five”, as a common device in jazz improvisation (I usually use the opposite... “fiving the two”??). I don't know if I like the idea of improvising using a different tonal center than what is written: after all, that's your only point of gravity, but sometimes we tend to use whatever random shape of our instruments we feel comfortable with? I don't know if I should say that!
So: no conclusion to this text, just more and more questions.