Klarinet Archive - Posting 000244.txt from 1999/11

From: Neil Leupold <leupold_1@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] KEYS
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 14:32:39 -0500

--- Leighton Bingham <cassus@-----.com> wrote:
> On the church list I read everyday they were talking about the
> difference keys make in music. Some felt that some songs sound good in
> one key but not others. Others could not tell the difference. One person
> said that the keys had identifiable qualities that were one used in
> selecting the key a piece should be written in.

If we're talking strictly about the aeolian and ionian modes, then my
opinion is that keys are purely relative, and that the affective qual-
ities that people have come to associate with certain keys have arisen
arbitrarily out of time and tradition. I suspect that, by coincidence,
early composers wrote pieces of a certain emotive quality in the same
key, enough times that the key itself became associated with that emo-
tive quality. Eb major is commonly referred to as a "heroic" key, and
Beethoven "just happened" to write "Eroica" in that key. I'm sure Bee-
thoven didn't start that particular tradition, but I do believe that
he was following it when he put Eroica in Eb. Three flats are also
associated with the Freemason movement, if I remember correctly, which
lends insight into the key of Die Zauberfloete, among others of Mozart's
works. Which of Schumann's s four symphonies is in Eb?

-- Neil
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