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[F_minor] RE: Key associations.
Hi Robert, I simply let you know that you are not the only one who is emotionally-impaired in this forum. we are with you!!!
As a supposedly "musician" , i have tried to think about the issue that you mentioned a fair bit...
from what i can gather, pitch is relatively an arbitrary thing.
as an eg. of that - n.american orchestras are prone to tuning in 440, while european ones often tune at 444, and the whole system itself has been moving up slowly ever since temperment became a standardized thing (around bach's time).
and if you've stuck it out through some music theory, you will know that the 12 key system is supposed to be symmetric like a circle. (ie. there are twelve keys, and any piece can be transposed through all twelve keys - for instance mary had a little lamb or the 9th symph can be played in all keys), then there technically should not be a beginning to the whole thing.
but for a symmetric system - the keyboard is an awfully assymmetric piece of furniture.
It shows a huge preference for the key of c major (as all the white keys on a piano, or black keys on a harpsichord), a Very Huge preference for Cmajor in fact, and almost all musicians start learning c major first. and i think herein lies the "key" to why moods maybe attached to keys.
i believe after the years, of playing c major, what happens is that some people's ears and their theory minds, become "atuned" to C, an arbitrary blip on the circle, that everything else is judged in relation to it.
in this way, it is very easy to see flat keys (such as both f (1 flat) and fminor (4 flats) ) as sadder, or more somber, as they are both moving downwards in key relative to cmajor (you can think of it as -1 for f major, and -4 for fminor). for the same reason, keys like e major tend to be bright (+4).
people such as beethoven (eb being his heroic key) and scriabin (key colour) tended to use keys in this way, probably for their own flow of ideas, as each key would be a touch stone, like a smell can be, while Bach, would openly transcribe pieces back and forth among key indistinguishably..
anycase, i really think it has something to do with the layout of the keyboard, and the fact that many musicians are made to learn c major for the early part of our lives.
*of the minor (sadness) and major (happiness), the answer is actually quite a bit simpler (and more solid), in that a major key has a harmony where the 3rd of the chord is more "in phase" (lower in harmonic series) than a minor 3rd which is used in a minor key. (** the harmonic series is like a ladder of consonance to dissonance). this means that the major 3rd clashes less against the other chord notes. and just like how families work, less clashing equals more happiness.
getting ahead of myself, but i hope that helps in some way to your question :)
please feel free to email me, should any of it be unclear / wrong etc.
i truly like exploring music theory ideas and wondered about this one often, so it is glad to hear other people writing about it too.
kindly from, alwin
Robert Merkin <bobmerk@earthlink.net> wrote:
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
> To: F_MINOR
> 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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