After studying a basic amount of music theory, I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as canonical analysis. Analysis, in most theories, is a way of rationalizing what's become common practice in a given style.
One thing I learned when trying to research the origins of our music system is that our chord progressions appear to be underpinned by rules for multi-voice counterpoint. But in pop music, voicing isn't particularly important, it's just background for the bass and melody lines. So pure chord progressions tend to harken back to harmonic motion that's familiar from the more formal genres. A book I often recommend called A Geometry of Music [1] goes way down the rabbit hole, if you want to obsess over this to the extent that I did.
So, modal chord progressions (especially Locrian) really only tend make sense to the extent that they analogize major and minor chord progressions, from a functional tonality perspective. I don't think this is precise, but the way I think of it is that you sell the listener on alterations of major or minor scales, and they buy it after a few repetitions, and other signals of what the cadences are :)
After studying a basic amount of music theory, I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as canonical analysis. Analysis, in most theories, is a way of rationalizing what's become common practice in a given style.
One thing I learned when trying to research the origins of our music system is that our chord progressions appear to be underpinned by rules for multi-voice counterpoint. But in pop music, voicing isn't particularly important, it's just background for the bass and melody lines. So pure chord progressions tend to harken back to harmonic motion that's familiar from the more formal genres. A book I often recommend called A Geometry of Music [1] goes way down the rabbit hole, if you want to obsess over this to the extent that I did.
So, modal chord progressions (especially Locrian) really only tend make sense to the extent that they analogize major and minor chord progressions, from a functional tonality perspective. I don't think this is precise, but the way I think of it is that you sell the listener on alterations of major or minor scales, and they buy it after a few repetitions, and other signals of what the cadences are :)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Geometry-Music-Counterpoint-Extended-...