Classical music seems to make a big deal about key signitures even to the point of naming the composition after the key it’s written in. What little I know about music come mostly from playing the guitar where if you don’t like the key a piece is written in you just transpose it up or down to your liking. If a song written in G is easier to play or sing in E then that’s how I’ll do it.
So what’s up with the “Fugue in D#m” stuff?
It sounded better than “Fugue in Em”? I dunno. Personally I think composers do it just so they can see how many sharps, double sharps, flats, and double flats they can possibly fit into one measure. My piano days would have been MUCH easier if all those dead guys had written everything in CM and Am.
[sub]Tongue firmly in cheek. I’ll just slip away now before I’m beaten about the head with Czerny studies.[/sub]
They are named that way because those naive classical composers didn’t have the marketing smarts to use catchy titles like “Music for Non-Existent Films” or “Revolution #9” or “Whipped Cream and Other Delights” or “I Wanna Sex You Up.”
A combination of tradition, lack of imagination, and perhaps also a holdover from the time before the modern ‘compromised’ scale appeared, when sharps and flats actually meant something and caused horrible tuning and transposition problems. The 12-note scale you play now is fudged a bit so the intervals between notes are all exactly the same and easy transposition is possible.
Another reason - certain instruments are designed around keys. Harps, flutes, etc. Not all are as adaptable as the guitar or organ.
I know if I were a prolific composer I wouldn’t bother to figure out a clever title for every piece, at least not right after it is written.
For the lucky few that have perfect pitch, it can be really annoying when a song is played in a different key than that in which it was written. I do not have perfect pitch by any means, but there are a few transpositions at which I shudder (especially when transposing has occurred for more than a few steps… it can really grate on the nerves).
Also, for example, in piano pieces it is just truer sometimes to keep the piece in the key in which it was written. A lot of the master composers’ nuances are achieved with the position that is demanded by the key. A good example of this is Shubert’s Op. 90 No. 4 Impromptu in G Flat Major. It is often transposed to G Major for those pianists who are not happy with all the flats. However, the positioning of the hand is UTTERLY different between the two keys and, consequently, the SOUND is different. In Romantic Music especially, the difference in sound makes a huge difference in how the piece comes across. Generally, in G Flat Major, one’s hands are forced up above the keys ever-so-slightly to sit above the black-key register, allowing for a much more sonorous and ethereal feel than when your stuck down on mostly white keys playing exactly the same steps of the piece transcribed into a more “readable” key.
Ahem
Well, I’m certainly no composer, but it makes the most sense to me to just put the key signature of a major work in the title so that the whole orchestra will be on the same page from the getgo because it’s absolutely essential that everybody know what key the song’s in. Most musicians can and do transpose music when they need to like, as has been mentioned, when folks are having trouble singing the song in its given key signature, but transposing a song’s key signature is not always necessary, certainly not for orchestras playing non-choral music. If I were to sit down with 2 other people and play Beethoven’s “Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano in C, Opus 56,” why would I even want to change the key signature? While it is annoying sometimes to play a song that’s got lots of sharps and flats in it, those sharps and flats inscribe meaning into the work. There’s a big difference in tone and mood between E major and C# minor, though both scales have the same number of sharps in them. Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” in C# minor would be a different song if it were written in E major IMHO. I understand things can get even trickier when you start dealing with different modes of music that I’m not prepared to discuss as I have no expertise in them.
Also calling the song a fugue as opposed to a sonata, a minuet, a sonatina, a nocturne, a mazurka, a concerto, or a symphony is a practical thing to do. There’s a big difference among all these types of music.
Keep in mind as well that if you’re a composer and you’ve written hundreds of pieces, it might get too difficult to give them all funky names like “The Moonlight Sonata” or “Appassionata”;however, if you look at the music, even these songs’ titles have the key signatures in them as well. Just call the piece what it is and be done with it. “Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Opus 15 for Piano and Orchestra” by Johannes Brahms is short enough and to the point, leaving no room for confusion.
Now, if an actual musician/musicologist wants to come in here and clean up/correct what I’ve said and give a more erudite definition about the lack of creativity in naming classical music selections, s/he is more than welcome to do so. 
JS Princeton, oh my heavens! G flat major is radically different from G major. I don’t have perfect pitch, but I do know that much. How could folks tamper with the key signature like that? 
Btw, I appreciated your explanation of how having to play in certain key signatures makes one position one’s hands, therefore contributing to the quality of sound. 
barton, sounds like you’re getting at those modes I don’t know a thing about. Were you referring to the Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian modes as presented in the following website? http://tyala.freeyellow.com/4scales.htm#Mode
Just looking at that website makes my brain hurt, and I don’t even think it hits on all the modes of music. Still, it’s just fascinating and daunting to think that of all the modes that music can be played in, we Americans are generally most familiar with 2 as seen in major and minor scales.
Do a Google search on “historical tuning.” (Or just go here.) Aparrently it’s a 20th-century idea that the notes on a keyboard instrument should be tuned at exactly equal intervals (called “Equal temperament”). Before then, each key signature had a more distinct nature, and it really did matter what key the piece was in. Or so they say; my piano tuner gave my piano a historical tuning. I couldn’t tell the difference.
My tuner also gave me a photocopy of a page from this out-of-print book, which lists quotes from musicians about the characters of different keys:
C major
“Completely pure” - Schubart, 1784
“Naturalness and nobility” - Gervasoni, 1812
“Cheerful and pure; innocence and simplicity” - Weikert, 1827
C-sharp minor
“Penitential lamentation, intimate conversation with God” - Schubart, 1784
“Despair” - (this from 4 different musicians)
D major
“Joyful and very militant” - Charpentier, 1692
“Pleasant, joyful, bright, songs of victory” - Masson, 1697
“Martial ardour” - Hawkins, 1776
“The key of triumph, of Hallelujas, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing” - Gathy, 1835
E-flat minor
“Horrible, firghtful” - Charpentier, 1692
“Feelings of the axniety of the soul’s deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depression, out of the most gloomy condition of the soul. Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of horrible e-flat minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.” - Shubart, 1784
and so on. E-major is uplifting and bright, while B-flat minor is gloomy, and good for preparing suicide.
Actually I have no idea if that book is out-of-print. Amazon isn’t selling them new, though.
Didn’t notice barton’s post until I’d already summoned the SDMB hamsters to wake up. He beat me to it
Re: the OP - my understanding from a music teacher was that :
a) song titles for specific pieces weren’t in common use in the classical period,
b) most classical composers were reasonably well known in thier own time, so titles like “Fugue in D Minor” weren’t confusing for period audiences, as the piece was only performed live and was reasonably unique.
c) Much later, the number of pieces with similar, non-descriptive names was deemed confusing, and hence the “opus 12, no. 2” descriptor idea was added, in some cases long after the composition was made. There are various systems that try to catalog pieces from composers along these, another example would be the ‘K’ numbers for Mozart compositions.
(I’ve tortured the heck out of Google trying to find cites for any of this, and I keep finding tutorials on music terms and CDs for sale, grumble.)
Re: tuning - (OK, I’m googled out & heading for bed, but here’s my understanding):
Instruments cannot be perfectly in tune in every key. Math forbids. If you tune an instrument to be perfectly in tune in a particular key, playing some intervals will ‘beat’ against each other and sound crappy.
Hence, ‘equal tempered’ became a popular scheme to even out the differences between tunings. Everything is just slightly out-of-true, but the differences are spread around reasonably so that different instruments can all sound ‘in tune’ with each other if they’re all tuned to an equal tempered scale.
Here is a site that discusses the equal tempered scale and the points above.
Any music majors care to step up to the plate on this (and I apologize for any errors/distortions – I’ve played guitar badly for many years and bad piano for longer) ?
What’s the obsession with key signatures?
I guess it helps to tell the difference. For example, Bach wrote so many fugues that most people wouldn’t know which you were referring to when you say “I like his fugue.”
Things get so much clearer when you are able to tell the listener that you like the C major fugue of the Well Tempered Clavier.
The key signature in pieces also influence the image of the piece.
A fugue in D# minor would be a lot more difficult to play due to the key it was written in (a fugue in d# minor normally moves into either g# minor or b flat minor, all keys with a lot of sharps and flats and more difficult to handle).
Of course, there’s also the images associated with keys. E flat major was Beethoven’s “heroic” key, g minor is Mozart’s tragic key etc. Knowing about these tells you plenty about what to expect in a piece.
Question for barton:
Are you sure about the intervals? I seem to recall that some notes have a different interval between them, thus the presence of the black keys between some white keys and absence of same between other white keys on the piano.
Well, that wouldn’t be it. The key signature along with the time signature are the first things you see on a score and the key signature is repeated on every line, so everyone in the orchestra will be very much aware of what key they are in during the whole piece.
Well, G flat is 1/2 step lower than G so they are obviously different when played side by side. If you were to start form dead silence and play something written in G but transpose it into Gb I suspect that very few in the audience would notice it. Those with perfect pitch might go “Hmmm, that sounds more like Gb to me. Oh, well.”
I’ve been working on the old Simon and Garfunkle stendard “April Come She Will”. I’ve noticed that the live recording is in tune but the studio version is about a quarter pitch sharp (or maybe flat, I can’t remember). In the studio there was only Simon’s guitar and Garfunkle’s voice, so it didn’t really matter if things were “properly” tuned, only that the voice and guitar were on key relative to each other.
Also keep in mind that there is nothing holy about the pitches that we assigning letters to today. Someone somewhere alone the line told the other members of his little band to tune their instruments so that note X on their instruments sounded like note X on his. The actual pitch was purely arbitrary, but we’ve been tuning our instruments to this long forgotten musician ever since. (Actually I just made up this last bit, but I bet it’s true)
Just as each key seems to have its own character and personality, there is the way each key seems to have its own color. See this thread.
Good points bnorton.
Actually, Baroque tuning was a half-step higher than our tuning standard. Thus, the same exact piece, written the same exact way on paper (key signature and all) would sound a half step higher when played on Baroque instruments (and recordings of this type are plentiful today).
As far as the OP, I’m guessing that was simply a matter of convention. Though there were certainly descriptive titles used by composers in the 17th and 18th centuries, they were not the rule but the exception. (BTW many of the more common titles we have today were not named by the original composer, but acquired the name latter on. e.g Beethoven’s “Moonlit Sonata” I believe acquired the name after some member of high royalty (King?) said something to the effect that the piece was like being out in the moonlight. It stuck. Bach’s Brandenburg concertos were named later on after his death for the town he was in when he wrote the (I think)).
By mid 19th century, descriptive titles (and stories to go with) became the norm, but before then, key signatures just seem like a logical way to help identify a piece.
There are multiple issues here. The issue of one having perfect pitch or not is different from the issue of equal temperament or the issue of pitch standards.
In this era we are very used to the idea of equal temperament, particularly if you play a fretted instrument or a keyboard. But it’s a compromise, which accepts making all intervals equally out of tune rather than striving for getting some “perfect fifths” perfect at the cost of pushing others out of whack. Some background:
http://www.casaninja.com/christi/academic/classicaltuning.html
Before equal temperament was widely used, different keys DID sound different, even to someone without perfect pitch, because of the different ways in which intervals were compromised in a particular key. Hence, the subjective qualities associated with keys such as in drewbert’s list.
That article also has a bit on tuning at the end - in general, concert standard pitch has been going up over the centuries, although standards higher than the modern standard have been used at certain points. As that article states, A=440 was a standard set in 1939.
As a guitar player, you are probably well aware that your tuning is a compromise. Try fine tuning your instrument so that a particular chord structure, say the folk D, is dead spot on and sounds “right”. You will probably find that some other chord structure, like say the A, will sound hideous. What you have done is tweaked the pitches of the strings so that the particular intervals produced by the one chord are just. Which shoves the intervals for the other further off. It’s not a shortcoming in the instrument or a fault in your tuning. It’s the result of trying to cut the octave into 12 equidistant pieces - you cannot achieve just intonation on all the intervals.
Some people have experimented with microtonal scales so as to be able to construct perfect intervals in a large number of keys. Trouble is, some of these systems wound up cutting the octave up into sixty-some odd pieces - and you thought our CURRENT nomenclature was a pain in the butt.
Quoth Monty:
The chromatic scale has uniform intervals: That is to say, if you play all the notes, white and black, you’ll be increasing uniformly. All adjacent piano keys are a half-step apart, and all half-steps are the same ratio (1.0594631 : 1). Any other scale has a pattern of half-steps and whole steps. For instance, all the major scales have the pattern whole-whole-half-whole-whole-whole-half, which is what you get if you play all the white keys on the piano, starting with C (the C major scale).
Incidentally, about that ratio: If you take three notes such that the first two are four half-steps apart, and the first and the third are seven half-steps apart (for instance, C E G natural), they’ll be in the ratio 1 : 1.259921 : 1.498307 . This is very close to 1 : 1.25 : 1.5, or 4 : 5 : 6. Ratios of small numbers resonate well together, so that sounds good to our ears: It’s a chord. It used to be that the notes were defined such that that ratio was exactly 4 : 5 : 6, which sounds even better. Unfortunately, you can’t do that exactly for all keys. So, if you played in a different key, you’d either have to re-tune your instrument, or you’d end up with something which just didn’t resonate right. Some keys work better than others, and sometimes, a composer wanted that little bit of dissonance: It can be used to set a different mood.
**celestina:**G flat major is radically different from G major.
How so, exactly? Yes, they’re a half step apart, but that hardly seems radical to me.
**celestina:**There’s a big difference in tone and mood between E major and C# minor…Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” in C# minor would be a different song if it were written in E major IMHO.
Well, yeah, there’s a HUGE difference between any major key and any minor key. I daresay that were it performed in any other minor key 95% of the listeners would perceive no difference.
I guess your OP’s been pretty adequately answered. Some of the answers relate specifically to the guitar, and you might find these observations of value:
It has been noted that before equal temperament the different keys did not correspond in the “linear” way you imagine – a piece recorded in B and then “speeded up” to sound in C would NOT be identical (pitchwise) to the piece transposed to C.
To some extent this is still true, for example, brass instruments produce some “pure” intervals, which cannot be produced homogeneously in every key.
Likewise, the harmonics produced on a guitar – this is why you should not tune by comparing 7th fret harmonics with either octave harmonics, or open, or even fretted strings (a rather long way of saying ANY OTHER NOTE)!
Some keys lend themselves to a particular fingering, and some fingerings will have there own specific resonances and other nuance.
Take your example of the keys E and G, and consider just the tonic chords. The “standard” first position E-chord has both the first and sixth strings open, both of them the tonic E – these will ring out compared to the fretted notes, this chord is “tonic heavy”, and the fifth (B) appears twice in total and the third (G#) only once. Whereas the “standard” first position G-chord has open strings D-G-B, which is a “perfect” balance of the notes of the triad, giving a much warmer and “up” tone (YMMV), it also has only one appearance of the fifth (D) but two thirds (B).
That is to say that even from the very limited perpective of strummed-guitar chord accompaniment that the two keys are simply NOT the same.
Caveat: I am not saying stick religiously with the “published” key – published song sheets are very often bollocks, (and most transcribers being pianists, “piano”-centric). Thus a song written in A gets notated in Bb, fine for the pianist, but a pain for the guitarist. Sometimes this isn’t the transcriber’s “fault”. Take, for example, the Beatle’s Norwegian Wood, which “sounds” in the key of E, so some sheets notate it as such, whereas the guitar part is/was played “in D” capoed up two frets.