Locrian mode

music
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Share
Share to social media
URL
https://www.britannica.com/art/Locrian-mode
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Print
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Share
Share to social media
URL
https://www.britannica.com/art/Locrian-mode
Related Topics:
mode

Locrian mode, in Western music, the melodic mode with a pitch series corresponding to that produced by the white keys of the piano within a B–B octave.

The Locrian mode and its plagal (lower-register) counterpart, the Hypolocrian mode, existed in principal long before they were mentioned by the Swiss humanist Henricus Glareanus in his landmark music treatise Dodecachordon (1547). In that work Glareanus expanded the standing system of church modes to accommodate the increasingly common major and minor modes as well as the growing importance of harmony as a determinant of melodic motion. However, the Locrian and Hypolocrian modes were notably excluded from the corpus of available modes because their finalis (the tone on which a piece in a given mode ends) on B, when paired with their secondary centre on F, created a tritone. Also known as the diabolus in musica (“devil in music”), the tritone was generally a forbidden sonority until the 18th century.

Virginia Gorlinski