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Music keys meaning12/25/2023 ![]() I prefer pieces which contain a larger number of melodies, chords and pitches, to provide a fuller illustration of what the key sounds like. I tried to find musical pieces from a wide variety of genres and styles, although my knowledge of some of them is limited. (Note: all 12 minor scales here are Natural Minor, as opposed to Melodic Minor or Harmonic Minor)Įach of the 24 main keys is accompanied by 4 songs played in that key. I'm especially interested in how people from non-Western cultures interpret these keys, and also to hear from anyone with synesthesia, to see if there is a correlation between music key and color. so other people can share and describe the emotional associations which they hear in certain keys. I can hear it in so many songs in that key. F Major to me has an utterly bittersweet sound that he doesn't mention at all. personal disagreement with some of Schubart's conclusions. to begin building my own database of which songs are in which keys (SongKeyFinder I'm not satisfied with, and also certain keys are missing from it altogether) to update these associations using modern songs and genres as my examples the topic fascinates me, and I've long held the opinion that you cannot take a song and cover it in a key different from the original without vastly altering the song's meaning. What I am attempting now is my own take on assigning moods and emotions to musical keys. When Mozart or Beethoven or Schubert wrote a piece in a Ab major, for example, they were well aware of this was the 'key of the grave' and knew that many in their audiences were as well." ( Musical Key Characteristics) It was part of the shared cultural experience of those who made, performed and listened to music. One music theory course from Western Michigan University elaborates: "The association of musical keys with specific emotional or qualitative characteristics was fairly common prior to the 20th century. To give just one example: the German composer and organist Christian Friedrich Schubart's Ideen Zu Einer Aesthetik Der Tonkunst, published in 1806, lists his opinions of key-mood correlation. It is this structure that provides context and meaning inside the music.Throughout history, attempts have been made to assign emotional states and moods to musical keys. What that means is that a key is based on a tone and a structure built around that tone. Each voice in the chord orbits around the central chord tone (chord root), while each chord system has an orbital relationship to the larger key center (tonic).Ī key is the tonality that is central to a piece of music. ![]() Melodic tones are derived from the scale of the key and live inside of chords.Ĭhords are little subsystems inside the larger key and have their own tonal centers inside the smaller chord structure. Melodic tones travel in various tension and release movements in relation to their distance from the key note. When you understand the cosmos of the key, you understand how the movement of melodic tones, intervals, scale tones, chord tones relate and behave with each other. The tones supplied by the scale are the building blocks for melody and harmony/chords within the key, where each tonal degree of the scale occupies a fixed intervallic distance away from the key center. It is this movement within a specified key that creates emotional communication and connection.Ī musical key can also be figured as a solar system of sorts where the tonic (key note) is the gravitational center of the key. Using a musical key creates a context in which to measure movement, to create the sense of a musical journey, a point of departure for materials that are not in the key, and a sense of coming home at the completion of a journey. Of course, a musical key includes a tonic and a scale (mode), but the psychological magic of a musical key is not found in memorizing scales and chords, it is found in discovering the family relationships between all the constituent parts of a chosen "key." For example, the harmonic qualities of chords, chord changes, intervallic movement in melody, and predictable tonal behaviors used in improvisation are all implied by the key.Ī musical key describes a context for music it is a structural system that creates meaning for any given note or set of notes used in the music-a palette of related tonal materials used for emotional communication. Said another way, when we speak of a musical key we are referring to a much larger concept than just a scale or a "key" note (tonic).
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