Talk:Key (music)

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[edit] Questions dating to 2002

should also explain what it means to say an instrument (eg Cornet) plays in the key of something. (never understood it myself) -- Tarquin

Yes, I think it should probably refer to transposing instrument, and the matter can be dealt with in detail there (transposing instrument needs some work - one of those things I've been meaning to do for a while...) --Camembert
Cool, thanks Cam. I get it now. :-) (though it sounds odd... if I play an electronic keyboard that's been transposed, I find it very off-putting.) -- Tarquin
Ah, that sounds like the curse of perfect pitch ;-) --Camembert
Ah (again) but does it worry you if you don't KNOW it's been done? :) I have the worst sense of pitch of anyone I know but if I am reading off music in the wrong key when singing I hate it - I don't think it's anything subtle, just that I know it's wrong and don't like it!! Nevilley

Now, to business. This sentence:

When a piece of music changes keys it is said to have modulated.

Is that true? I always thought that modulation meant a process had taken place - other than just the key change - some idea of preparation, even if it's just a dominant seventh in the new key. But if it's just a crash key change (I suppose the typical pop song Cheesy Key Change (TM) would be an example, but there are plenty elsewhere) with no preparation, is that still a modulation??

Just a thought. Nevilley

Good point, that. I went to xrefer.com and it came back with the Penguin Dictionary of Music: "a change being accomplished by 'continuous' musical means (i.e. not simply by starting afresh in another key)"; and the Oxford Dictionary of Music: "by evolutionary mus. means (not just by stopping and starting anew in another key". So it seems you're right - modulation has to be something more than bumping a piece up a tone to be worthy of the name. I guess we need a lot more stuff on modulation and changing key in general. I'll try to knock up a quick fix to be going on with. --Camembert

How definite is modulation and key -- to what extent is it a matter of individual interpretation? Take the Wedding March, for instance. Does it modulate in the space of some 4 bars, or are the Am and B chords just in passing? (PS I meant the Mendelssohn, the one everyone plays badly on clunky pianos when it's not chopsticks) -- Tarquin

Ugh, Wagner (unless you mean Mendelssohn, but he's even worse)... Well, I think the word "modulation" implies structural significance as well as key change, so this isn't really modulation, whatever else it might be. Whether it's really changed key is perhaps a more subjective thing, yes, although I doubt any musical analysts nowadays would say it had - they would prefer to say that the harmonies were extended or that it was passing or whatever. I mean, if you stop after those four bars and try to play a perfect cadence in your "new key", you can't do it and make it sound convincing. On the other hand, the perfect cadence at the end of the exposition of sonata form movements, where you're normally in the dominant, is completely convincing, indicating that you're pretty clearly in that new key (although there's a lingering feeling that you're not finished yet, because you're not in the same key you started in). I think that test (trying to play a convincing perfect cadence in your "new key") is a pretty good one, though I daresay others would disagree (and of course, what's "convincing" is pretty subjective in itself).
But sure, key perception is quite a subjective thing - I have no doubt that Alban Berg's Violin Concerto ends very clearly in a certain key (B flat major? I forget), although others would probably not hear it that way. Likewise, I can hear certain phrases of Anton Webern's Variations for piano being in a certain key (the more I hear it, the more I think this), but I'm sure most people hear the whole thing as a big atonal mess. How to stick all this in the article, I'm not sure, however... --Camembert


I think in the Oxford Companion there's a list of the colours & moods generally associated with each key. Would something along those lines be good here? Also, I read in Jozsef Gat's Technique of Piano Playing that the reason Romantic composers preferred the black-note keys is that on the piano, the difference in finger angle produces a mellower sound on black notes. (great book BTW, but euw! at all the diagrams of muscles and bones...) -- Tarquin

Never heard that about the black notes before - interesting. As for the colours - that might be interesting to have here, but I seem to remember that various composers came up with different colours for each key. Rimsky-Korsakov did a list, I think, and so did Scriabin, and someone else I can't remember, but I don't think they agree on very much. It'd still make interesting reading though.
Relationship between moods and keys are also interesting - F major is pastoral, D major festive, C# minor tragic, that sort of thing. I daresay there's some disagreement here as well, but probably less, because characterisations tend to be based more on pieces actually written in a certain key in the past than on pretty subjective criterea - C# minor is largely thought of in the way it is because of the Moonlight Sonata, for instance. So sure, stick 'em in if you've got a list. --Camembert

[edit] Gravity

Removed the following:

An analogy that would be easy for a non-musician to encompass is that a musical key is like the force of gravity: what goes up, must come down. The entire history of music can be summed up as composers learning to "jump" higher and higher. In keeping with this analogy, Bach and Mozart were playing hop-scotch, Beethoven invented the hot-air balloon, Berlioz was the first to pilot an airplane, Wagner was the first astronaut, Scriabin went to the moon and back, and Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Miles Davis blasted off and haven't been seen since.

Entertaining, but not particularly edifying. —Wahoofive | Talk 19:21, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Opening sentence

I think the first sentence needs a lot of attention. Based on what I take it as meaning, a song in the key of C major can be based on either the C major scale or the C Mixolydian mode, as opposed to just the C major scale, because both scales have the notes C-E-G. Any rewording?? Georgia guy 19:44, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

There is some disagreement among music theorists on this point, especially with regard to the minor mode. There is a significant body of music by composers such as Vaughan Williams which uses such modal influences, but is considered major or minor. For example, RVW's Mass in G minor is in the Dorian mode throughout. A fair amount of pop and rock music in C major might well have the characteristic B-flat of mixolydian (to say nothing of blues, where the flat seventh is pretty much de rigueur). But our article also says:
A key may be major or minor; music in the Dorian, Phrygian, and so on are usually considered to be in a mode rather than a key
and that would include the mixolydian. I'd hate to have the opening paragraph get too hung up on such theoretical details, however; our target audience is non-musicians. If you can improve the article, however, go for it. —Wahoofive (talk) 18:14, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Technical nature of the article

I know absolutely nothing about music theory. My brother and my wife are into music, though, so I wanted to see if I could finally understand just what key was. So when I read the opening sentence of this article... "In music theory, the key identifies the tonic triad, the chord, major or minor, which represents the final point of rest for a piece, or the focal point of a section." ...you can imagine I am no closer to understanding what exactly "key" is. Still. Is there any way to explain key to people like me who know nothing about music theory? I mean, barely understand more than what sharps and flats are, and that only because of their keys on a piano/keyboard. :) RobertM525 00:11, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tarot Cards

Wow... This is some article. I came here hoping to find some information.

My understanding of keys is that, first, we have major keys, which is music played with the root note as well as the notes which are 2, 4, 5, 7, 9 and 11 semitones higher. So, music in C Major uses the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B. Then there are minor keys, which use the root note as well as the notes 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 10 semitones higher, and the notes 1 and 11 semitones higher at times. So, music in A Minor uses the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B, and at times Ab or A# as well. Maybe I'm ignorant, but when people think of key, I think this is what they are talking about. When they say "C Major" what they mean is a major scale with a root of C.

I haven't a clue what this article is trying to describe. It kind of appears to be hinting at what I just said at the beginning, trying its best to describe it in terms no one without a background in music can understand, but by the end of the article, it's just nonsense.

I'm talking about the "Characteristics of Keys" section, which seems to be a copy of this:

http://www.wmich.edu/mus-theo/courses/keys.html

I have this little book that came with a Tarot card deck. The funny thing about its descriptions for each card is that if you look at it objectively, the description of each card says a lot, but is still generally vague, to the point that all you get out of it is that some cards are good and some cards are bad. There really isn't any real information in the descriptions at all, but that isn't too surprising, as they're nothing but bullshit anyway. The cards are just cards.

This description of keys reads the same way.

"Feelings of the anxiety of the soul's deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depresssion, of the most gloomy condition of the soul. Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of horrible D# minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key."

What a load of bullshit.

First of all, it's minor chords, not minor scales, which tend to make a piece of music using them sound less happy than a piece of music which doesn't. It also doesn't seem to me to be anything which is so well defined. It isn't that each chord is either happy or sad, but that they're all different, and have tendancies, but it also depends on how you use them. Now, a minor key does have a minor chord as its root, but there's no reason you have to linger on it the entire time, and so a song in a minor key can sound happier than a song in a major key, and conversly, the major scale doesn't seem to prevent anyone from creating sad music. In short, I don't believe the effect of key on the feeling of a piece of music is worth more than a sentence or two. The feeling of the music is still largely up to everything else the composer does.

Secondly, unless you have perfect pitch, you cannot tell the difference between a scale in one key and a scale in any other key. This "Characteristics of Keys" section would have someone believe that if they transpose a song to a different key, it will alter the feeling of the song. It doesn't make any difference at all. Most people can't even tell a song is in a different key, let alone get a different feeling from it as a result.

Maybe it's a new kind of vandalism. Write overcomplicated nonsense in an article and it will remain forever because an expert in the field, someone who knows enough to realize it's just an overcomplicated description of a simple concept, likely won't ever read the article. All of the talk of "tonic triad" and "cadences" sure makes me afraid to edit the article, and if that stuff isn't required to understand what a key is, then I think we have vandalism that everyone is afraid to touch.

I'm deleting the "Characteristics of Keys" section, and if anyone cares to rewrite the rest of the article, I suggest just deleting everything you can't make sense of. I don't believe a key is anything that is so difficult to understand that it warrants a "too technical for a general audience" template. Personally, I'd just replace the article with "a key is a scale with a particular root" and leave it at that. A section on instrument keys is useful, but not the one in the article. -- The one and only Pj 08:36, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't agree. First sentence in the deleted portion states "Here is a list of the characteristics of each key from Christian Schubart's Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1806)", which sounds like a well defined thing to me (even if today it might be only one oif the many ways of looking at the key). That's not vandalism! Cobru 10:52, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
If someone wants to include it on a page about Christian Schubart's Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst, then I don't see a problem with that. The problem I have is that it is nonsense and so it doesn't have a place in a factual article about musical keys. A lot of nonsense has been written about all sorts of subjects, especially if you look back 200 years ago to find it, but that doesn't mean it has a place in an article on the subject. Including the information in this article implies that it is useful factual information, but it isn't.
As for vandalism, I was referring to the beginning of the article. I don't know enough to say for sure that it is, but it reads to me like an overcomplicated description written to include as many advanced music terms as the author knows. In particular, I believe the "final point of rest for a piece" it refers to is a consequence of the key the music is played in rather than the key being a consequence of that "final point of rest." A piece of music has a key long before the end of the piece is reached. If what the article said was true, then you would be unable to determine the key of a piece of music without hearing the final chord, which isn't true. That "final point of rest for a piece" is determined by the key in use, and so you can pretty much guess what the "final point of rest" is going to be before you've actually heard it, which means that the key isn't determined by it, but that it is determined by the key. -- The one and only Pj 10:40, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Of course, it's probably not vandalism. All I meant to say was that it seems like vandalism, a type more resistant to removal because it appears to actually say something which leads everyone who might edit the page to feel like they shouldn't because it currently says something that is beyond their understanding. I don't feel like whoever wrote that knew what they were talking about, and for me to go and write whatever I thought I knew onto any random Wikipedia page certainly would be vandalism. In fact, that why I haven't edited this page yet, because I'm no expert and I don't know for sure that what it says is nonsense. If a few months pass and no one cares to claim that this article does make sense, I'll probably rewrite the article as I see fit.
...but there's probably no point in waiting, really. I don't believe the article makes any sense and at least one other person has found it to be completely useless in its current form, so it would appear to need a rewrite even if what it currently says isn't nonsense. Does anyone think this article is useful in its current form? -- The one and only Pj 10:59, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Difficult! :-S

I wanted to know what this "key"-concept is that i hear all musicians talk about. After reading this article i still have no idea. Will someone please write a version of this "for dummies". These are things that ought to be included: how key are related to tones and frequencies in Hz, how keys are related to chords, it would be nice to have some 'sound illustrations'-small mp3 files of some chords in some keys. There must be thousands of wikipedians that know these things, please make this article a litte more understandable. U could still keep all the music theory stuff, but maybe further down on the page so I can read it when I actually know the main concept. :-) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.188.198.241 (talk) 21:44, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

I think part of the problem is that musical keys are not very easy to explain. Plus the term is used differently by different people. But I do agree that the opening is not exactly easy to understand, even for musicians! I don't trust my own understanding enough to feel like I could write a simple opening that others would not find wrong somehow, but perhaps I'll give it a shot -- something along the lines of a key being, in a very general sense, essentially equivalent to a Tonic (music). In other words, music in the key of C implies a scale that begins on the note C (the first note of the scale being called the "tonic"). Of course there are all kinds of exceptions and complications, but perhaps some statement like this could start the article off, with the complications being explained as it goes on? As for the relation of keys to frequencies in hertz -- there isn't a strong relationship. The Pitch (music) article explains how notes like C, A, F-sharp, etc, have not always been tied to the same frequency of sound (and still aren't universally). If one assumes the modern standard of 440 hz for A, then one could explain keys in terms of hertz, but I'm afraid it would be counter-productive. On the other hand, some text explaining why that is so might help. Similarly, sound files of chords in different keys would be of little use, since all keys sound the same, just higher or lower in pitch (by an amount in hertz not universally agreed upon!). In short, while it seems like the concept of "key" should be relatively simple, it is actually not so simple. It rather requires one to already understand such things as scales, major and minor, tonality in general, etc. And even then I am assuming 12-tone equal temperament, among other things! Further, the term "key" is used for quite different purposes, such as when talking about the key of an instrument (such as a Bb clarinet). Still, I'll see if I can write an intro. Musical theory people, please forgive me if I screw it up (and improve it you can!). Pfly (talk) 22:04, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Ok, I made my attempt. I realize it goes against many more technical definition of "key". I tried to balance a basic description of the common usage of the term with repeated comments about how the reality of musical key is more complicated. Hopefully I didn't do too much of a hack job of it and perhaps for people with little or no music theory background might get something from it. It seems a relatively tricky subject. While I can't claim to be an expert on music theory, I've been learning about it for many years, and yet while I understand things like the differences between French, German, and Italian augmented sixth chords, a seemingly basic concept like "key" is very hard to explain in a simple, succinct way. Please improve if you can (or even remove if it is not worth keeping!) Pfly (talk) 23:26, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the changes but I'm as confused as 83.188.198.241 was by the article. I love classical music and have been a regular concert-goer for some 30 years, but my eyes glaze over when I hear people speak of keys. Alas, despite the recent changes, the article still seems unintelligible. To explain "Key" with sentences like "in key of C means that C is music's harmonic center or tonic" is to explain the unknown "key" by the equally unknown concepts of "harmonic center" and "tonic." The closest thing I've found so far that provides a start on a meaningful discussion appears above on the talk page under the unlikely heading of Tarot Cards:
"My understanding of keys is that, first, we have major keys, which is music played with the root note as well as the notes which are 2, 4, 5, 7, 9 and 11 semitones higher. So, music in C Major uses the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B. Then there are minor keys, which use the root note as well as the notes 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 10 semitones higher, and the notes 1 and 11 semitones higher at times. So, music in A Minor uses the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B, and at times Ab or A# as well. Maybe I'm ignorant, but when people think of key, I think this is what they are talking about. When they say "C Major" what they mean is a major scale with a root of C."
I don't know if this description is correct, but at least it's reasonably clear. Perhaps a way to go would be to extend this concept to all keys, tabulating the notes of an octave (including sharps and flats), against the various keys, and mark which notes would be played in music written in specific keys. SteveMcCluskey (talk) 17:19, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
It's a fairly difficult concept to explain. I'd guess that if you asked college-senior music majors to define "key", most of them would be pretty much unable to. Unfortunately it's one of these areas where the more you know about it, the less certain it seems. The quote above is the equivalent of asking the gravity article to say "gravity is when things fall down." Some pieces change keys as they go along, or borrow notes from other keys, or have passages where the key is uncertain. Defining a key as a scale, as the quote above does, is too nursery-school to be useful. —Wahoofive (talk) 00:17, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Keys and tonality

So that's a key. What is a tonality then? Is it the same as key? There's no statement that show what a tonality is. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.203.36.71 (talk) 17:23, 26 January 2008 (UTC)