![]() ![]() People often connect negative emotions to other minor keys such as A minor, E minor and B minor. Is it really the “saddest key”? Of course, D minor doesn’t hold the musical monopoly on sadness (nor D# minor, its close sibling). I don’t know why, but it makes people weep, instantly, when you play it!” ![]() As Nigel Tufnel, the waggish musician protagonist of the 1984 mockumentary Spinal Tap, said when putting his sentimental “Lick My Love Pump” in D minor: “It’s the saddest of all keys. Yet modern songs written in D and D# minor, by and large, still deal with misery. With equal temperament tuning, musicians can transpose songs between keys, and keys themselves are less important to the underlying personality structure of songs. This should render Shubart’s argument moot. The post-Shubart twelve-tone equal temperament system divides the octave into 12 parts, so that distances between notes remain the same - which means that keys no longer sound so different from each other in a structural sense, and that it’s the chord structures within keys that define sounds. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.” “Melancholy womanliness” was Schubart’s preferred term in describing the D minor key, a key of particular fascination because it lent itself to music in which “the spleen and humors brood.” And its sibling key, D# minor, somehow evoked “ feelings of the anxiety of the soul’s deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depression, of the gloomiest condition of the soul,” Schubart observed: “Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of D# minor. Schubart was a forefather of musical category creation: In his 1784 essay “A History of Key Characteristics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries,” he balanced a study of the harpsichord with insights from literature and psychology to match all 24 major and minor musical keys to different auditory personalities, which streaming’s predictive models would later automate. But well before predictive computer models were let loose on music, German composer Christian Schubart was already on the case - albeit with manual handiwork and antebellum verbal flair. To find a song that matches our mood, in the 21st century, we need only type in how we are feeling or walk into a new room, and a streaming service’s algorithm will grab that data and intuit our needs with unsettling ease.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |