RE: [F_minor] the key of f minor for most of a recital!

["Robert Merkin" <bobmerk@earthlink.net>]

Hmmm ... okay, for the benefit of the musically ignorant or hearing-impaired (or emotionally-impaired), could you comment a bit on why a pianist or soloist would choose these keys as a response to a great tragedy? What were some of the substituted pieces?

A long time ago, there was a discussion on f_minor on the historical association of the minor key with sadness, and I found it fascinating. The respondents -- maybe you were one of them-- noted that minor = sad turns out to be a relatively recent universal association, a cliche mutually understood by modern composers and their audiences. I think music as recent as the 17th century was cited in which the minor key was commonly used to reflect happiness or grandeur with no association with sadness. Somebody may have blamed minor = sad specifically on the Romantics. 

But I confess to being such a slave to the minor key cliche that I'd thought it was a universal (or at least Western Pythagorean) emotional association that all listeners at all times accepted.

So why (if the question has meaning) did Gould love f-minor above all keys, and why at a moment of national tragedy, shock and mourning did Browning reach for f-minor or b-flat minor? Which composers are most responsible for these associations?

Here's 

http://www.musicaltimes.co.uk/archive/obits/200301browning.html

a very nice bio of Browning, who died in 2003. I'm a big Samuel Barber fan, and Browning premiered the piano concerto that Barber wrote for the inauguration of Lincoln Center. The very young Barber, of course, was launched into American immortality when his Adagio for Strings was broadcast constantly as the radio accompaniment to the state funeral of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Uhhh ... what key's it in, do you know? If we're looking for music to make us feel certain ways, should we shop based on keys?)

Bob Merkin


> [Original Message]
> From: Brad Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>
> To: F_MINOR <F_MINOR@email.rutgers.edu>
> Date: 10/17/2006 9:33:05 AM
> Subject: [F_minor] the key of f minor for most of a recital!
>
> Not directly related to Gould, but I thought this was interesting. 
> There has been a release of the piano recital that John Browning gave on 
> the same day that John F Kennedy died.  He changed whatever the original 
> program had printed, and announced his music from the stage as he went 
> along.  Almost every piece, for this whole recital, was in either F 
> minor or B-flat minor!
>
> http://www.amazon.com/John-Browning-Vol-I/dp/B000BDH55E
>
> Brad Lehman
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