bnorton, okay, hon. I ain’t gonna quibble with you over the key signature thing. I know it’s written on the sheet music and all, but I still can’t help but think it’s essential to make it as easy for folks, especially a whole orchestra, to be on the same page, especially when you get into them big compositions like symphonies and stuff, where the composer might like to switch key signatures around from movement to movement and sometimes within movements and sometimes within measures. You’ve got to start somewhere, and if you’re switchin’ key signatures within a piece–whoo, lord, and if you get caught up in them trills and whatnot that can run on for a measure or so–it helps to remember where you started. But that’s just me.
But now I will say that G major and G-flat major are two verydifferent scales, and GaryT I wonder why you can ask how they’re so different. We’re talking basic scales here and some common sense. If G major and G-flat major are so similar, then it wouldn’t make no nevermind if you played them both together, now would it? But it does matter. Now I don’t know too much about guitars, but for piano, these two scales are different. G major has one sharp, F#, in it. G-flat major, also known as F# Major, has six sharps in it: F#, C#, G#, D#, A#, and E#.* I imagine most basic scales and chords book will tell you this. Yes, if folks played a song and some played it in G major and some played it in G-flat major, A.K.A. F# major, then we’d be hearing some really discordant notes. Try playing F and F# on the piano at the same time, and you’ll see what I mean. I will repeat. I ain’t got perfect pitch, as far as I know, and I ain’t a composer for any instrument let alone the many it would take to make up an orchestra, but I can tell when a piece changes key signatures–and I don’t have to be looking at the sheet music to know–and I sure as sugar is sweet would be able to tell when a song switches from one sharp to six sharps because the notes are different! Now if someone wants to come in here and give a more erudite explanation than what I provided, have at it.
*I’m talking about G-flat major in its classification as F# major so y’all can more easily see the difference in sharps, rather than confuse the issue with a whole bunch of flats and sharps all up in here. Okay?
It’s obvious that if the guy on the clarinet is playing a piece in F major and the guy on the piano is playing the same piece in E major, the notes will clash and the duet will be horrible.
However, if the piece was originally written in F major and BOTH musicians play it in E major, only someone who has perfect pitch (or is incredibly pretentious) is going to notice the difference.
celestina - We may be talking about two different things here. Obviously G and Gb don’t sound the same even to the most unsophisticated ear. If half the orchestra is playing a piece in G and the other half in Gb it would sound horrible. However, what I am saying is if the entire orchestra played a piece in G one night and then the entire orchestra played the same piece in Gb to the very same people the next night, very few in the audience would notice the difference. At the same time everyone in the orchestra would know they were different because of the completely different fingering.
Or try it this way. Let’s say you have two guitarists in a room. One of the guitars (guitar A) is tuned normally, but the other (guitar B) is tuned a half step lower. How can they possibly play anything together and make it sound right? Easy. Guitarist B just fingers everything a half step higher. He is now playing all those sharps and flats you talked about but it sounds exactly like what Guitarist A is doing (Actually as has been pointed out in this thread there will be very slight differences to the highly sensitive ear.)
In fact guitarists do this all the time with a thing they call a capo. This is a device that clamps down on the strings at a chosen fret so that the guitarist can play as though he is in a comfortable key such as C while the singer is singing to her preferred key which might be Eb.
I think that whether the audience would be able to tellthe difference is beside the point. As someone mentioned earlier, there are subtle differences in the “feel” of each key, and the composers of classical pieces quite deliberately chose the keys they wrote in. The audience might not be able to tell you the piece is being played in a different key than last night, but the composer works under the assumption that the overall feel of the piece would be wrong in a different key.
This is not to say that everyone would feel or sense the difference. But some music simply wasn’t written to be practical. The composer picks the key for him or herself. The audience can enjoy that as they see fit.
And The Great Unwashed made an excellent point about guitar chords. The balance between each note in a chord gives it a distinct character. So many rock songs are written in E major because not only does it enable you to use the lowest note available to you, but the chord starts out with a 1-5-1 (E-B-E) that lends it extra power. Same goes for songs in A, and aside from the ease of fingering these two chords, I believe that this is the reason people love to use the power chords based on E and A. A power-chorded C sounds a lot more meaty than a plain old C-chord.
If you’re happy simply transposing songs and don’t notice a significant difference, cool. But I think there is an undeniable difference between the keys. And that’s especially true on a heavily physical instrument like the guitar, where chords can sound weaker or stronger depending on how high up the fret board you try to play them. Sometimes I find that a song is drastically improved by a simple transposition! Conversely, there are some songs I love that come out so awful after transposition that I refuse to play them.
Actually I think we are in agreement here. Notice that I said that very few in the audience would notice the difference between the two performances. The only question is what percentage we are talking about. I’m sure if you could measure it, sensitivity to music subtlties would be distributed along a common bell curve. Somewhere along that curve people lose the ability to notice the differences you mention, and that includes noticing the different feel.
To expand on this: Typical brass instruments have seven possible fingering arrangements (actually eight, but 3 is almost exactly equivalent to 1,2). To get more than eight different notes, you have to change the configuration of your lips. Well, if you take a number of identical brass instruments, tuned the same, and the musicians playing them all use the same fingering, you will get a chord, no matter what notes the individual musicians are playing. It’ll even be an exact chord, not the approximate ones you get from even tempering.
On the other hand, if you want to have a chord with the brasses and the saxaphones, or between two brasses playing different fingerings, you won’t get this perfect match, and how imperfect the match is may well depend on the key.
I thought the point here was that E and C#m are each other’s relative major and minor, respectively. That is, each key contains the same notes, and a glance at the staff wouldn’t tell you which one you were in. Only the harmony of the piece tells you that. There’s no difference in the notes contained in each key, but there’s a big difference in the scale intervals, and the diatonic chords within each key.
Another thing no one seems to mention is that just because it says minor doesn’t always tell you enough. Which minor? Dorian (Major 6th)? Phrygian (flat 2nd)? Locrian (flat 2nd and 4th - might as well substitute a diminished scale which has 9 notes)? Hungarian (flat 2nd and sharp 3rd - my favorite 'cause you can actually play major chords over it)? Etc… ad nauseum.
However, I’ve written/composed many pieces that I give titles like “C Me B Flat” which goes from C to B flat; or Dennis D-minished which focuses on the D Diminished scale. Then there’s “Shiznet” in an F# chromatic funk structure… ok, so that has nothing to do with the naming convention, but read on. So I guess I kind of understand it all.
Think about the days before computers when people had to keep track of actual pieces of paper. Easier to catalog a song by type (sonatina, concerto, etc…) for the type of occasion (church, wedding, funeral, dinner party, etc…) and key for the gravity of the situation (I personally find that D minor is the saddest of all the chords, really).
Also (jeez I’m long winded), different keys/scales provide different strengths. I find E Dorian the easiest to play funk in, although I think C# and F# Dorian are more “truly” funky. A Hungarian minor is the easiest to sound “classical” although D# Hungarian minor is what you hear the most of (taccata and fugue in D# minor springs to mind). B flat is the easiest key to play blues in for horns, but G is more accepted for guitars.
So, in conclusion, writing songs in different keys is VERY important. Naming them with the key was the easiest way to keep track of the written work pre-computer.
I think barton, waaay up top, did the best at answering the OP. Back before valves & keys were invented, brass and wind instruments could only produce notes in a few limited key signatures. Thus, the key of a piece depended on the available instruments, which is why so much Haydn and Mozart music is in D major.
bnorton, you’re probably right in that the majority of an audience wouldn’t notice if an entire orchestra was playing a piece in a different key than written. My high school chorus used to sing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus in C major, a full step lower than the true key. I noticed, but only because I didn’t have to tax my voice as much to sing it in the lower key.
But what’s your point? I think your question has been answered, and the rest of this discussion sounds like an attempt to make classical composers and audiences look pretentious: “My Impromptu Number 7 in A-flat must only be played in A-flat; anything else is wrong.”
At this point, I’m not sure what’s going on in this thread, but that’s okay. I’m sorry if y’all think I’m being pretentious, making composers sound pretentious, or am talking about apples when y’all are talking about oranges. That was not my intention. Oh well. I’ve had a blast reading this thread. It’s been quite educational.
7-string, I tried to mention the different modes of music, but I don’t know that much about them. Thank you for breaking them down a wee bit.
celestina - I don’t think anyone is calling you pretentious, but rather the suggestion is that it is pretentious to claim that “Dm is the saddest of all keys” or something like that.
Having played guitar (badly) most of my life, I’ve witnesses the tremendous differences in the sensitivity of individuals’ ears with respect to music. For me to play by ear even the simplest song is a major task, but some can pick out the chords to very complex stuff without breaking a sweat. I hate those people.
Given that, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are people out there such as 7string who have a very subtle but real emotional reaction to Dm that is different form their reaction to Am. For me, I’d be doing well to identify the chord as a minor.
The key is not in the title so that the listener at the time could say. Hmmm D Major? nawww I don’t want to hear something in D Major tonight.
The key was not in the title to let the musicians know what key to play in as every sheet of music has the key written on it. (not wrtten out in longhand either)
I think the thing you have to consider is who was the music being written for. In baroque and early classical times all composers had patrons. That is some rich dude (usually a royal) either paid you or you lived in his ‘house’ and you wrote for that person only. Your music played at his parties or funeral or whatever. The patrons considered the composers servants. And as such they didn’t really care about them all that much but everybody who was anybody had composers on staff. Now if a bit of music was really popular it got a name. For instance the Mozart Symphony number 40 is also called the Jupiter symphony. (god I hope I remembered that right) as the ‘patrons of the art’ weren’t going to remember ‘symphony number 40’.
Other early music had names as well. Handel has many names on his works like. The Water Music (written for a floating parade) Fireworks music (written for a fireworks display). These were written because the boss said something like ‘Hey Handel! We’re going to watch some fireworks next week. Write some music to accompany it.’ It’s not like Handel said ‘I want to creat some music that will sound great with fireworks’ and then went on and created something. He was doing a job. A composer may be told to write a symphony for some party that was coming up. Just like the cook was told to make a feast for that party.
All folk music from the time had names because people wanted to remeber those. And remember at the time you only heard music performed live.
So of course as the opera form started to come to rise all of those had names because you were playing in an opera house to a more general public. Nobody would go see ‘Opera number 6 in E major’ but you would go see Aida.
Beethoven is comonly credited as being the first composer to ‘make it’ with out a patron. All of his later works have names as he was writing for himself/the general public.
Romantic period composers (the people right after Beethoven) all named their works.
Careful, Zebra, that’s just too big of a generalization to make. I hope you’re not suggesting that all “Romantic” period composers gave their works descriptive titles.
The Dm thingy is a paraphrase from “This Is Spinal Tap.” A must see movie. I don’t neccessarily subscribe to “the saddest key” thing.
Having said that, If you play a pice of music on a good digital piano… get used to it… enjoy the subtleties. Then go into the functions and transpose the keyboard down a half step. Now play the piece again. It will take on a different quality. Now transpose it a whole step (up or down) and it will sound even more different.
You can keep doing this with reckless abandon and you will notice different things about the music each time. It’s actually a cool exercise for your ears.
And another thing (don’t take me seriously… I sure don’t), in the USA we base our music off of “A” being equal to or an exponent to 440 vibrations a second. One octave higher would be 880Hz. One octave lower being 220Hz. In Europe they use 442. Granted it’s a VERY subtle change, but if you’ve listened listened to music in 440 all of your life 442 will sound a little different even if your ears aren’t trained to hear it.
Now, having said that (I think I’m going to start every paragraph with that from now on), with the advent of digital tuners, almost all pop and electronic music has migrated to 440.
Zebra, the “Jupiter-Symphonie” by Mozart was Symphony Number 41 in C Major. No, I can’t tell you the Köchel number offhand. I never got around to memorizing Köchel numbers, let alone Schmieder numbers for J.S. Bach.
Mozart’s Symphony Number 40 in G Minor is the best known, or most popular, of Mozart symphonies (the “Jupiter” comes in second place). But the catchy title for it is … wait for it … “Symphony Number 40 in G Minor.”
Yeah I know that’s a big generalzation but any post classical composer who didn’t give descriptive titles to their works were drug additcs.
Jomo
God damn it! I’m still mixing up number 40 and number 41! (botched that on a listing test once)
Yes what I posted was a great generalzation but it is kind of a general question. But I think if you look at things in very general terms then my explaination works. After all we don’t want to get into the hows and wherefors the ways that the political and industrial revolutions affected musical compositions and how they related to their audience. (really we don’t…do we?)
But wait there is more.
Musicians don’t have to know what key a symphony is in to play it!
If you sitting there playing second violin you look at the sheet music and you look at the key signature and maybe you see two flats. Maybe you are in B-flat major. Maybe not. But what do you care. You play the notes when you are supposed to and in tune and you let the ‘tonality’ take care of itself. Heck, I know plenty of musicians who can’t tell what a key is, but they still manage to play their part.
Your ears may have differing sensitivity to differing pitches, or your keyboard a differing response, BUT, whichever, it is certainly not the change of key, per se, that causes these differing perceptions – ALL keys in equal temperament have the same intervals and tone colours.
Elsewhere…
re: Moonlight and Jupiter et al. Hardly a single one of these names was given contemporaneosly by the composer. Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony is an exception, so I concede that they exist.
I’ll add a cavat to that: there are differences in the change of key outside of pitch.
You have to go either up or down the octave range. Try playing something in middle C, then drop down to, say, the D below that. You’re still within the same octave but everything will have more bass.
There are all sorts of wonderful voicing issues on guitar when you switch keys, as when you use different strings they make new sympathetic vibrations and harmonics along with one another. This wouldn’t happen on a digital piano, however.
