A Man. A Plan. A Canal. Panama. This is one of my favourite palindromes (and one of my favourite The Fall Of Troy songs). But there are other palindromes in music as well. In this article, we will discuss palindromic scales and mirror modes.
Try reversing or “mirroring” the order of intervals in any given scale. Reversing the order of intervals in a palindromic scale will produce the same scale. Otherwise, we will end up with a new ‘mirror scale‘ that is on the opposite side of the brightness/darkness spectrum.
This idea of the bright/dark spectrum of scales adds another layer of thinking in the way we write and improvise with these scales.
With that brief primer out of the way, let’s get into the article on palindromic scales and mirror modes!
