What is a musical key?

[anonemouse]

Yay, jokes!

How can you tell when there is a drummer at the door?

The knocking is steady but he never knows when to come in.

 

[staggerspool]

You forgot one: diminished = villain twirls his moustache as maiden is tied to the railroad tracks


And now a joke for the musicians in the crowd...

Q. How can you tell if a singer is at your door?
A. He can't find the right key and doesn't know when to come in.

Also forgot Augmented.
Major and Minor chords, in isolation, sound like they have nowhere to go. They are "happy" (major) or "sad (minor). In both they sound stable because the 5 is a "perfect" interval, meaning it has no tension, just wants to sit there. The third determines the "mood."

A diminished chord has a minor third and a "diminished" fifth, a semitone lower than a perfect fifth. The diminished fifth is the infamous tritone, or devil's chord. An augmented chord has a major third, and an "augmented" fifth, a semitone higher than a perfect fifth. The diminished chord is the 7th chord in any major key. The augmented chord doesn't occur naturally in a major key, which makes it the coolest of all the basic chords.

Because a perfect fifth sounds so stable, the diminished and augmented fifths always sound like they want to move to the perfect fifth, again in isolation. So in mood terms, we are into unstable territory, the crazy chords. Maybe bipolar is in order here, diminished for depression and augmented for manic. Though that's a stretch beyond.

And of course, you CAN make a major tonality sound very sad ... but it is pretty much impossible to make a minor sound happy. Kinda like how you know, in your heart of hearts, that when you are happy it is always going to end, and when you are sad, you're sure you'll never be happy again.

To add to the perplexity, there are also suspended chords, where the third is actually a fourth, and wants desperately to be a third... so it is unstable, but has a perfect fifth, so it isn't a crazy chord even though it has a note that wants to move. So maybe it is "inspired."

And once you start stringing them together, all sorts of weirdness happens...

If you're a major musical genius like Joni Mitchell, you make up your own chords that move according to your innate inner ear, chords of "complex unresolved emotionality." So they can be happy and sad at the same time.

It's really impossible to understand this stuff technically unless you really study it, but somehow this doesn't matter to a listener, the emotional logic is just there to hear. That is why music is the greatest harmless mystery there is.

 

[Yoga Face]

It's really impossible to understand this stuff technically unless you really study it, but somehow this doesn't matter to a listener, the emotional logic is just there to hear. That is why music is the greatest harmless mystery there is.

indeed


Terbs like me , musical illiterates, can still enjoy great music without understanding a damn thing about music which is why it touches everyone and is so universally popular

 

[Mod99]

You forgot one: diminished = villain twirls his moustache as maiden is tied to the railroad tracks

You forgot one - suspended. Leave out the third, play a perfect fourth instead. Or a major second.

 

[nobody123]

You forgot one - suspended. Leave out the third, play a perfect fourth instead. Or a major second.

Now why would someone with the power to ban accounts remember suspended ?

Though I do wish it was an SP with man-mades and not staggerspool who thought of augmented.


...and come to think of it, since I am sitting nekkid at my keyboard, I kinda wish I hadn't thought of diminished!

 

[Mod99]

Now why would someone with the power to ban accounts remember suspended ?

One of life's little coincidences. Though I see it struck a chord with you.

...and on that note...

 

[Scooter Brown]

You forgot one - suspended. Leave out the third, play a perfect fourth instead. Or a major second.

Not really. This was true at one time, but understanding of dominant sus chords changed in 1960s and both 3rd and 4th are played quite often (3rd above 4th, so it doesn't sound harsh). We have to go to the jazz theory that handles a lot of stuff that cannot be properly described in the classical theory and I don't want to go into detail, but for this discussion, it will suffice to say that dominant sus chord can be best described as playing a second inversion of major triad one whole tone below the root (clear as mud, I guess. LOL). Gsus in C-major scale would be G (root), C, F, A. There are many variations on a dominant sus chord, such as G, D, F, A, C (in C-major scale). Other than dominant sus I've just desdribed, there are Phrygian sus chords (sus b9) etc.

There are also altered chords, derived from a 7th mode of a melodic minor scale, not mentioned here. Every note in alt chord is altered, thus the name.

For those interested, a lot of this stuff can be found on Wikipedia, or if you want to dig deeper into jazz harmony, I would recommend Mark Levine's book "The Jazz Theory Book". As I said before, classical music theory falls seriously short when it comes to modern harmony progression.

Since other posters mentioned world music (Indian, Gamellan, Far East), I would add Blues scale to the mix, just for the record. I also heard some ethnic music where dissonance is a must. It cannot be represented without going into some exotic notation, such as the one devised by Haba (with 1/4 tone intervals).

To the OP - the posters above described the basics quite well. May I suggest that you stay away from jazz theory until you fully undersand the basics of classical theory.

 

[Yoga Face]

To the OP - the posters above described the basics quite well. May I suggest that you stay away from jazz theory until you fully understand the basics of classical theory.

Indeed. Thx for all the info. Tell me if I am starting to understand. Let me try to analyze Moonlight Sonata

moonlight sonata first movement sounds "sad" because it is in C sharp Minor if it was in major it would sound lively which would be wrong for what Beethoven was trying to say


it starts with a C# ( traditionally the first note played) making it in the chord of C# but it is a minor chord because of the notes that follow which are D# E F#G# A B

seven notes make a chord ( doe re me fa so la ti or as written down abcdefg ) after that the notes start to repeat in hertz (vibration cycles made on a tuning fork) so the notes sound the same although they are at a higher pitch

Question : are these the only 7 notes traditionally played? Are both the right and left hand in the same key?

such simple music yet so beautiful ! Well done Ludwig !

 

[nobody123]

it starts with a C# making it in the chord of C# but it is a minor chord because of the notes that follow which are D# E F#G# A B

seven notes make a chord ( doe re me fa so la ti or as written down abcdefg )

Question : are these the only 7 notes played? Are both the right and left hand in the same key?

Careful now! The 7 notes are not the chord, the 7 notes are the scale. Chords are simply the, errr, "important" notes of a scale. first, third, fifth, and whatever else gives it its particular shape and sound.

And the 7-note scale that corresponds to a song's key are not the only notes played, no. Think of the key as home - you may wander away by a number of different routes, but all your journeys begin and end there. Plus you spend a lot of time hanging around there or near there. Crap metaphor? Yeah, but at least it ain't too technical.

And yes, the right hand and left hand both play in the same key, as would all members of a full orchestra etc., even if some members are playing instruments that are not in concert pitch and would call the notes something other than what they are. Don't ask.

Hey! Major minor demo video. yeah!!!

 

[Yoga Face]

Careful now! The 7 notes are not the chord, the 7 notes are the scale. Chords are simply the, errr, "important" notes of a scale. first, third, fifth, and whatever else gives it its particular shape and sound.

And the 7-note scale that corresponds to a song's key are not the only notes played, no. Think of the key as home - you may wander away by a number of different routes, but all your journeys begin and end there. Plus you spend a lot of time hanging around there or near there. Crap metaphor? Yeah, but at least it ain't too technical.

And yes, the right hand and left hand both play in the same key

THX FOR THE CLARIFICATION

THE WONDERFUL ASPECT OF MUSIC IS THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE TO UNDERSTAND IT TO FULLY APPRECIATE IT

I do not believe this can be said for other art forms

 

[trippingwalker]

ugh, all this talk of triads is making me sick. What is it with you guys and your old world common practice era perception of tonality?

Tonality is ***so*** 19th century and we can thank late romantics like Liszt, impressionists like Debussy, the "russian school" (stravinsky, prokofiev, rachmaninoff, etc), serialism, and dodecaphony (Schoenberg) for that great feat.

Let's be honest here... when it comes to modern music and flexible pitch relationships, your understanding of harmony means nothing unless you understand upper-structure triads and chord extensions, bro!

C7 don't mean shit unless it has a b9, #11, and a 13

But seriously... major and minor tonality are ambiguous when it comes to more modern music like jazz and rock and roll. These styles depend largely on flexible pitch relationships to create the sounds we recognize as 'hip' instead of the more rigid pitch relationships that have made up much of this discourse so far. Look no further than to see (or hear) the dominant 7th #9 chord... which would've been considered an uncorrected, indecipherable horror back in Mozart's day. But ain't it crazy how when Jimi Hendrix plays a chord with pitches a semitone apart (#9 [augmented 2nd for the fanatics] and major 3rd), it not only sounds fucking awesome, but it's also simultaneously major AND minor.

 

[trippingwalker]

Careful now! The 7 notes are not the chord, the 7 notes are the scale. Chords are simply the, errr, "important" notes of a scale. first, third, fifth, and whatever else gives it its particular shape and sound.

that is an incredibly misleading assumption, brother. The true fact is that the entire scale makes the chord. The 1st, 3rd, and 5th give you a triad... which is like learning to put the round shape in the round hole, the triangle shape in the triangle hole, and the square shape in the square hole.

If you look at C major, sure, you have C-D-E-F-G-A-B but that isn't and accurate chord voicing. You need to consider the scale harmonically - not melodically. So if your tonic is C, don't think "1-3-5 + the other ones" you should really think "1-3-5-7-9-11-13" which literally yields C-E-G-B-D-F-A which is a Cmajor13

Depending on the KEY, you might get C-E-G-B-D-F#-A (which is your IV chord in G major but the upper structure triad yields a Major 7 #11 chord.

But if you take C and build a scale out of F you'll actually yield a dominant 7th chord... so... yeah... chord-scale relationships.

I think you have to wear different hats depending on who you're playing with. Ornette Coleman was one of the greatest pure musicians to have ever lived on this planet but his understanding of harmony couldn't have been any more radically different than Haydn's.... or Schoenberg's or Pearl Jam's.

It is an art... not a science.