Klarinet Archive - Posting 000585.txt from 2006/03

From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Re: Keys (from Let's get real)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 16:06:31 -0500

My congratulations to Ed for being so right and so forceful in
his presentation on the nonsense of keys carrying inherent
emotions. It was a terrible idea when it got invented and it has
gotten no better over the years. For a while, everyone believed
that C major was "pacific" and F major was "calm" and F-sharp
major was for serious emotions, while A major was for emotions
"whose details are better not to be described," blah, blah, blah.
All of this was done from whole cloth without a single shred of
evidence to support such doo-doo.

D major was the key for stentorian and heroic music. But when in
a performance of an aria with a high b or c, the tenor asked that
the musicians transpose down a tone, the piece wound up in the
"pacific" key, even though it was supposed to be "stentorian."

The crap that musicians invent to support non-supportable ideas
stuns the imagination.

Dan Leeson
DNLeeson@-----.net

-----Original Message-----
From: Lacy, Edwin [mailto:el2@-----.edu]
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 11:48 AM
To: klarinet@-----.org
Subject: RE: [kl] Re: Keys (from Let's get real)

<<<I, too, have heard the hogwash about F major being a "calm"
key, and
so
on. This ignores the rather serious problem of transposing
instruments. If the orchestra is in F major, then my Bb clarinet
is in
G major, my A clarinet would be in Ab major, the alto saxes would
be in
D, and despite continued research, science has not yet determined
which
key the french horns would be in.

So, does that mean a clarinet playing in G is "calm"?>>>

No, a Bb clarinet playing in its written key of G IS in the key
of F.

We can call the matter of the character of various keys "hogwash"
if we
want to, but that doesn't negate the fact that some pretty
outstanding
musicians seem to have been able to associate various keys with
their
own distinguishing characteristics. I'm referring to such
musicians as
Mozart, Beethoven, etc., etc. The fact that any particular
individual
may not be able to hear these qualities, or that I may not be
able to do
so, does not constitute evidence that such a phenomenon does not
exist.

Ed Lacy
University of Evansville

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