Thanks!

Thank you. I appreciate that!

Thank You!

Thanks! Tell your friends. Tell your neighbors. Tell random strangers on the subway!

Thanks for the kind words!

Typically, an inversion is used so that you have a more interesting bass line, but it doesn't change the chord itself.

Great question! It has a lengthy answer. Take the G7 chord. In most cases of Modal Music it's either NOT used or used in a very specific way such as over top of a Pedal Tone to help keep it from having the tendency to resolve to C Major. The other thing you can do is just not play the b7th, and stick with the G Major triad, which is a nice consonant sound and doesn't have the same tendency to want to resolve. Now take the B dim. The Triad version, which has a b5th, is a very unstable sound. So you don't get the same consonant sound if you're just playing the triad. It's also the upper structure of G7. G B D F minus the root is B D F. So it's inherent instability is why it's not used in Modal Music. The Cadence chords and Approach chords are Major and Minor chords which are not unstable chords within themselves like the diminished triad. That being said, it's important to understand that you avoid these chords when writing in the strict academic setting. In the real world you can basically do whatever you want. If you're writing Modal Progressions you want to throw in a Diminished chord or a Dominant chord that resolves to one of the Cadence chords you can do that. You'd be blurring the lines of different types of music and writing in a gray area, but that's up to the composer to decide if that's the sound that they desire. You just need to make sure you're music isn't accidentally going somewhere you didn't intend- in other words you have to make sure those outside chords don't make the I chord feel like it's not home anymore. But any chord can follow or precede any other chord. Diminished triads are used in Film Scores quite a lot and in various ways. In Jazz, the diminished triads or -7b5 chords are used exclusively as part of a II-V-I progression. In the Romantic Era and in Tchaikovsky's book, he has other uses for the diminished triad where you basically just wedge it in between two consonant chords in the key and it's a pretty cool sound. There is an exception to the G7 chord, which is in the Dorian Mode. A very common Dorian Modal Cadence is the IV7 to I-7, which completely ignores the typical modal rules. I honestly don't know why that's an exception, it just sort of is...

I never actually got around to writing part 2! I do have a lot of other episodes about modes and one about Ostinatos (which would basically be part 2). Ostinatos are just a different way to express a modal color instead of modal progressions.