The best way to teach the diatonic modes is to compare them to each other in parallel. One way to do that is to just run up and down them scalewise, but that isn’t very musically satisfying. So I thought, how about putting a familiar melody into all the modes? I wanted one that touches every note in the diatonic scale, and that fits within one octave. “Joy To The World” fit the bill perfectly.
I am not the first person to have this idea, but I think I did a better job. I used beats from INXS and the Meters.
I present the modes in circle of fifths order, from “brightest” (most sharps) to “darkest” (most flats): Lydian, major, Mixolydian, Dorian, natural minor, Phrygian, Locrian. See the interactive Noteflight score here. The colored notes are the ones that get flatted to change one mode to the next.
Does this have any musical value beyond music theory teaching? At first the non-major versions sounded goofy and wrong to me, but they are growing on me with repeated listens. I especially like the Phrygian mode version, there is something so heartbreaking about hearing a familiar major-key tune with all the major intervals flipped to minor. Robert Komaniecki demonstrated this with “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”. It makes me wonder how other childhood classics might sound in Phrygian.