I just watched a special on Lincoln Center. The symphony hall was “inaugurated” by a Bach cello piece in G major. And the cellist said that G major is “a very forgiving key,” – as in, it conveys forgiveness.
A little earlier, I read that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s favorite key is D-flat major. From Playbill:
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He reiterated that his favorite key is D-flat major, and pointed out that all his biggest, most emotional numbers are in this favored key. He went on to play “Memory” in different keys to illustrate how “resonant” D-flat is by comparison.*
Are there other keys that have such qualities, whether they’re consciously known to the general public or just to educated musicians? Usually minor keys are considered more menacing than major keys, but is there really a whole spectrum of emotions associated with different keys? How much worse does “Memory” sound in C?
… but on the piano certain keys seem to lend themselves to certain kinds of music, perhaps in part because of the texture/shape of the key beneath my fingers. E minor is “rustier” and meaner and more stark than D minor. C# minor is ominous. B major is like golden honey with bells ringing.
For some of us with synesthesia, musical keys have different colors, and therefore very different personalities. Though probably no two of us would agree with the details.
“It’s part of a trilogy, a musical trilogy I’m working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don’t know why.”
-Nigel Tufnel, Spinal Tap
On an equally tempered piano, I don’t really notice much difference. (I do not have perfect pitch.) I may have some association with keys because of contexts they show up in, but if you go up or down a semi-tone, I may or may not notice. There are keys I like because of the way they feel (for example, blues in F feels really good under my fingers, as the shape of the scale is good on the keyboard for blazing fast runs), but if I’m doing licks where there are major thirds sliding into minor thirds, I tend to prefer keys where the major third (and augmented fourth/flatted fifth) go from black key to white key (like in the keys of C and G) because then I could use one finger to glance across the black key and land on the white key, and it has a bit of a different grace note feel to it than if you were using two fingers to replicate. (This is different than what is usually taught in classical technique.)
For other instruments, keys do matter in terms of where the open strings are and how the strings resonate. For example, an open E chord on guitar will have three strings fretted, and three ringing “open” (unfretted.) If you play it as a bar chord (with all the strings fretted), you have a bit of a different tone to it.
And, back in the older days where temperament was not precisely equal temperament, but all 12 keys were still playable (let’s call it “well tempered”), there were more significant differences in the feel of the keys, as the exact pitch relationships between the same intervals in different keys varied a bit, so, say, a fifth may be slightly “wider” in one key than another, or a third may be more pure, etc.
Nice. Yes, I don’t have experience with True Tempered instruments, e.g., a piano designed to play in a specific key, i.e., one with the problems leading to innovations in Temperament. It is my understanding that different keys do exhibit different “emotional responses”/ have different “personalities.” It makes sense that much of that would be lost with the intro of Even Temperament.
Also true about guitars - and yeah the tunings matter. Lots of folks play folk and Celtic music in DADGAD tuning because it lends itself to long, ringing chords that support those genres. Rock and the blues use keys of A and E to take advantage of the tuning of a guitar, and open-chord tunings have their own personalities. There’s a reason Open G sounds like Keith Richards.
If you have access to a synth, most of the better models seem to have different temperament options on them. It does sound rather…odd…when you tune to a pure major scale (where the fourths and fifths are pure with no beats) and then venture out of the key. Even regular major key stuff in key sounds different. I don’t know if any of them have more of the historical temperaments like the Werckmeisters (which was used around Bach’s time during the Well Tempered Clavier) or anything like that. You might find Just Intonation.
Harmonicas also are generally not equal tempered, either. The Hohners, for instance, are usually in something called Richter temperament (with the exception of the Golden Melody, which is supposed to be ET, according to most sources), where the major chord (assuming a diatonic major harp) is “purer” than its equal tempered cousin.
And, of course, any instruments where you can play notes “in between” like fretless instruments, for example, you can pretty much play any temperament you want.
I may be misinterpreting what you’re saying, but it doesn’t sound to me like the cellist intended to say “it conveys forgiveness” (i.e., it stimulates emotions of forgiveness in the listener). I believe he meant that it’s “forgiving” to the performer (i.e., minor mistakes and deviations aren’t as obvious to the audience as they would be in another key).
That would make some sense, as the cello strings are tuned to C, G, D, A, and I’ve heard cellists say the keys of C, G, and D are easier to play than other keys. (In the key of G, D is the fifth and C is the fourth, both very important scale notes.) I do not have any experience playing cello or fretless stringed instruments myself, so a cellist’s viewpoint would be appreciated.
But most instruments do have keys that are easier or more familiar to play than others. For example, on piano, C is typically the beginner’s key (all white keys, no black keys in the scale.) Ergonomically, though, there can be an argument for B being the key that fits the best under the hand shape (although that is a bit of an odd-ball key for piano, especially the notation being in five sharps.) For guitar, because of the position of the open strings, if your guitar is tuned to EADGBE, the keys of E, A, D, and G tend to be the easier keys to play in. For many horns, because of the way they are made and tuned, flatted keys are quite common. And so on…
I’ve started a thread on this topic myself, several years ago. I had a copy of Handel’s Messiah that said that one piece (probably “Surely he hath borne our griefs”) was written in the “horror key” of B flat minor. And in Blues Brothers, John Belushi directs the band to play the theme from Rawhide in A, a “good country key”.
Yeah, because of the layout of the guitar, G, D, A, and E all tend to be “good country keys.” Those keys also work well for piano (easiest is G for me, followed by A, then probably D & E in terms of how the keys fall beneath the fingers. Others may have slightly different preferences.)
Extending on what **pullykamell **and **WordMan **said.
If you’re using an equal-tempered intrument, there are no differences, i.e. if I played something on F#m and electronically changed the pitch to Dm you could not tell the difference with a piece played directly on Dm.
Unfretted instruments do play notes differently according to the key, so a violinist playing C-D-E on the key of Dm would sound different that on the Key of, say G#m.
With guitar, where multiple versions of the same chord are posible, I don’t think the effect is the same.
The story I heard was that Berlin could only play piano in one key (let’s say C major, which is all white keys – not sure there is a key that’s all black, but I could be wrong). He had a piano built with a mechanical contraption that could transpose keys by turning a crank. So he would turn the crank to E flat major, play the usual key of C notes, but the melody would come out in E flat major.
He likes the pentatonic scale? (That would be the effect if he only used only the black keys. He favored the black keys, so much of what he did was in F# major, but his music contains white keys, too. It would be horribly boring if everything he composed only chose from 5 notes.)
Supposedly, he worked with an assistant. He’d have her play what he had written, then she’d try out different notes and chords, and he chose the ones he wanted. It’d seem a lot easier to learn to do it himself, but he never did.
I’m a semi-pro musician, but hardly ‘classically’ trained so my observations are just anecdotal. To me, C Major is a utilitarian Key. The key of D Major is springtime, Emajor is summer, and the fall is F major and its correlating D Minor. E minor is just sad, anyway you slice it. F Minor is the winter, particularly the deep January/February Freeze. All scary things happen in B-flat and E-flat Minor…and the Key of G-flat is just unnecessary. Having been a musical theater director, G-flat minor rears its ugly head way too often. I like the key of A major for doodling before services when I’m at the pipe organ. And D flat is lovely rain. And way too overused by Andrew Lloyd Weber. He really only seems to alternate between C major and D flat major, and it’s borrrrring.
And my key, the key I gravitate to when I’m sad and want to improvise–A minor.
