What’s All This About Keys?

By Robert Aubry Davis

 

The Circle of Fifths ¹

Let’s begin with Francesco Geminiani’s “The Art of Playing on the Violin,” published late in the story (1751) by a composer who studied with Corelli and could summarize what his era was about musically:

The Intention of Musick is not only to please the Ear, but to express Sentiments, strike the Imagination, affect the mind, and command the Passions. The Art of playing the Violin consists of giving that Instrument a Tone that shall in a Manner rival the most perfect human Voice; and in executing every Piece with Exactness, Propriety, and Delicacy of Expression according to the true Intention of Musick.

Next, each key comparing Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) and Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) from different generations, adding a new set each time we hear a new key.

Couperin thought A minor was “tender and plaintive.”

For Mattheson,

" [ it was a key] Of a sumptuous and serious look. But also leads to flattery. By nature, very moderate, a little plaintive, decent (respectable), quiet, even inviting to sleep. Can be used for all movements evoking the soul. It is moderate, and gentle for the public."

Many weighed in on C major.

Charpentier said it was “gay and even like a warrior.” For Mattheson, it was a key “of an insolent bent, in the character of rejoicing, wherein we give free rein to our joy.”

Jean-Philippe Rameau said this key “sings the song of joy and gratitude.” Later, the German commentator Christian Schubart (1739-1791) wrote of the key that it was “perfectly pure; innocent, naive, eventually charming as the tender speech of children."

Charpentier thought of E♭ as “cruel and hard.” Mattheson said it was:

“ very full of pathos; never serious or plaintive or indeed exuberant.”

Charpentier saw F major as “fierce and carried away (or quick-tempered)”. Mattheson said:

Magnanimity, firmness, perseverance, love, virtue, ease. One cannot better describe the wisdom, the gentleness of this tonality than by comparing it to a handsome man who succeeds in everything he undertakes as quickly as he wants, and with “bonne grȃce,” as the French say.

Charpentier saw G major as “sweet and happy.” Mattheson called it:

A key full of innuendo, of patter, of brilliance. It is also suitable for both serious and cheerful things.

Charpentier has B♭ as “magnificent and joyous.” Then, Mattheson on B♭:

It is entertaining and also glitzy, yet also modest. It can pass as both beautiful and cute [here he uses the French “magnifique et mignon”]. It is for raising up a flattened [or “leveled”] life [he uses Latin: “Ad ardua animam elevat”]

Charpentier thought D minor was "serious and devotional", and Rameau thought it "conducive to sweetness and tenderness.” Mattheson said it was:

"Devotional, calm, tall, pleasant, happy. An event. Entertaining, not hopping about, but fluid. The tonality of the things of church and in common life, and of the tranquility of the soul.”

While Charpentier thought G minor was “tender and plaintive,” Johann Mattheson expanded that idea:

It is almost the most beautiful of all tones. It mixes the seriousness its predecessor (G Major) with an alert tenderness but also provides grace and charm: Tender or invigorating things; moderate laments or moderate joy...always, G Minor is extremely flexible.

Then, to answer the unspoken question, let’s look at the intentionality of choosing certain key signatures:

The idea of assigning emotions and moods to music goes back to ancient Greek modes and continued through the medieval “church modes”.

For our purposes, trying to schedule a different type of program 52 weeks a year, it is mostly just a fun hook on which to hang a program.

Some qualities attributed to key signatures changed over the decades (E♭ notably); some remained entirely the same for half a millennium: D minor is the perfect example. There are many sources that make these attributions in the 17th and 18th, and into the early 19th centuries. Here is an excellent site that looks at attributes from various Baroque and early classical commentators, as well as 20th century interpreters:

Christian Schubart's Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1806) ²

C major	Completely pure. Its character is: innocence, simplicity, naïvety, children's talk.
C minor	Declaration of love and at the same time the lament of unhappy love. All languishing, longing, sighing of the love-sick soul lies in this key.
D♭ major	A leering key, degenerating into grief and rapture. It cannot laugh, but it can smile; it cannot howl, but it can at least grimace its crying. Consequently only unusual characters and feelings can be brought out in this key.
D major	The key of triumph, of Hallejuahs, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing. Thus, the inviting symphonies, the marches, holiday songs and heaven-rejoicing choruses are set in this key.
D minor	Melancholy womanliness, the spleen and humours brood.
D# minor	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.
E♭ major	The key of love, of devotion, of intimate conversation with God.
E major	Noisy shouts of joy, laughing pleasure and not yet complete, full delight lies in E Major.
F major	Complaisance & calm.
F minor	Deep depression, funereal lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave.
F# major	Triumph over difficulty, free sigh of relief utered when hurdles are surmounted; echo of a soul which has fiercely struggled and finally conquered lies in all uses of this key.
F# minor	A gloomy key: it tugs at passion as a dog biting a dress. Resentment and discontent are its language.
G major	Everything rustic, idyllic and lyrical, every calm and satisfied passion, every tender gratitude for true friendship and faithful love,--in a word every gentle and peaceful emotion of the heart is correctly expressed by this key.
G minor	Discontent, uneasiness, worry about a failed scheme; bad-tempered gnashing of teeth; in a word: resentment and dislike.
A♭ major	Key of the grave. Death, grave, putrefaction, judgment, eternity lie in its radius.
A♭ minor	Grumbler, heart squeezed until it suffocates; wailing lament, difficult struggle; in a word, the color of this key is everything struggling with difficulty.
A major	This key includes declarations of innocent love, satisfaction with one's state of affairs; hope of seeing one's beloved again when parting; youthful cheerfulness and trust in God.
A minor	Pious womanliness and tenderness of character.
B♭ major	Cheerful love, clear conscience, hope aspiration for a better world.
B♭ minor	A quaint creature, often dressed in the garment of night. It is somewhat surly and very seldom takes on a pleasant countenance. Mocking God and the world; discontented with itself and with everything; preparation for suicide sounds in this key.
B major	Strongly colored, announcing wild passions, composed from the most glaring colors. Anger, rage, jealousy, fury, despair and every burden of the heart lies in its sphere.
B minor	This is as it were the key of patience, of calm awaiting one's fate and of submission to divine dispensation.

You may know that 20th century commentators like Scriabin and Glenn Gould kept up this practice; and, since each key has an internal “logic” in construction, whether A=375 or A=415, or A=470, it would have the same impact on the listener.

So, scales started and ended at a certain place since the inception of Greek modes, and they were given a specific affect (the famous link of Dorian to d minor gives us a 2500-year continuity of “feeling” the same way…the same way Beethoven did in his 9th symphony). While the 19th century Germans carried this to typically ridiculous extremes, the basic emotional reception of certain keys was, is, and always will be.

You may remember Leonard Bernstein’s Harvard Lectures, on why minor keys feel melancholy—here is an excerpt: https://soundcloud.com/deme_85/leonard-bernstein-why-is-minor

A Reflection on Astrology

Do you have a copy of Frederich Oberkogler’s Tierkreis und Plantenkräfte in der Musik? It should be in every library! But seriously, this led to the creation of the Anthroposophical tone zodiac, so each sign gets a major and minor key…

I do try and cover collections that were well or ill received at first publication as we go along… but remember we are not quite in the land of large-scale public performances, or indeed published reviews, until well into the very end of our era.

Pitch

Finally, pitch: Pitches varied widely not only in the Baroque, but well into the 19th century.

However, the roughly half-pitch standard (A=440 vs. A=415) while you can detect the difference when I play back to back recordings with old vs. new tuning, does not change at all the relative use of the key signature. That is to say, g minor is still g minor and A Major is still A Major.

The way it strikes the listener emotionally, which many commentators have written about, is a different area of conversation.

But allow me to quote the great oboist Bruce Haynes on the topic:

Prior to the late 19th century, however, there were no universally recognized pitch standards. One could travel from one part of Europe or, in some cases, from one city to another and find music being made at different pitches. For a string player, this in no problem – the string can be tuned to any pitch (within reason) – but for a fixed-pitch instrument, like a flute or an oboe, this can be a huge problem. It might mean that if you were an oboist, you could play in tune with a violin band but not with the church organ, or you could form your own band with your friend with a recorder made in your village but not with your friend with a recorder from the next town over.

In the Baroque Era, pitch levels as high as A-465 (17th century Venice) and as low as A-392 (18th century France) are known to have existed. A few generalizations can be made:

• pitch was high in North Germany and lower in South Germany

• pitch was low in Rome but high in Venice

• pitch in France depended on whether you were playing chamber music, opera or something else.

Pitch levels in the Renaissance and Middle Ages were similarly varied according to location and historical period. By the Classical period there was more interest in standardized pitch levels, again as a matter of convenience for traveling musicians.

One of the pitches used during the baroque period was A-415. Since 415 hz. is about a half-step below the modern standard of A-440, the pitch of A-415 was seized on as a convenient modern “baroque pitch” standard, because in the early days of the historical performance movement a harpsichord would sometimes play with groups at A-440 and sometimes at a lower pitch, and if the difference in pitch is a half-step, the keyboard could be made so that it slides over one string so that the A key played a string tuned to 440 hz. in one position and a string tuned to 415 hz. in the other position.

“So when you play baroque music, you tune to a G-sharp,” some people say at this point. Not so! We tune to an A, but we define the A differently depending on what kind of music we’re going to play. A baroque violinist may carry 4 different tuning forks (or one handy iPhone app), and a baroque flutist probably owns two or three different flutes at different pitches.

Keys, Composers and Composition

And now, some thoughts on why a composer would even consider key signatures in composition, rather than just standardizing to the easiest possible format.

Nowadays, we all know what a piano looks like, so let's stare at that keyboard in our minds.

If we all wanted to make life easier, everything would just use the white keys.

So, every piece of music would be in C Major, or if we wanted a minor key, A Minor.

But composers are creative people, and like all creative people, their minds (and hearts) want to expand beyond the assigned and easy realms.

Every artist knows the techniques of the past; if every visual artist were only allowed to paint as our old PBS associate Bob Ross, the world would be a diminished place.

In the 12th century, the reason Hildegard von Bingen was so extraordinary (not counting her visionary poetry, her explorations in botany, her defiance of accepted norms, and her leadership skills), was because she took every accepted tenet of music at the time and exploded them outwards.

Hildegard, in our analogy above, used black keys. Every great artist is challenged by the black keys of their art.

Every key signature is there as a rule, and every rule is made to be broken. Handel broke Corelli’s rules to the shock of all who witnessed it, and Bach, like the titanic genius he was, defied all and mastered all.

It is in the nature of the human mind to assign order to things. The ancients just knew there was a higher order in all modes, and the evolution of the Baroque era was based on recreating the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome. On the one hand, that meant creating opera, and on the other it meant giving a context to the vast new experimentation with music, including writing it in different key signatures.

Is it different than the assignment of colors to keys by Scriabin or now with Jennifer Higdon? Is there experience less valid, because they feel musically perhaps differently and surely with more sensitivity than do we?

You can play with keys, and in our Baroque realm, Bach surely did.

The great case, for example: Vivaldi’s best-selling collection, his Opus 3 L’estro armonico…

Bach took the B minor four violin concerto from his beloved Vivaldi, and transcribed it into A minor for his four harpsichord concerto (almost certainly written for Zimmerman’s coffee house and those Friday evening gatherings).

Here is a fun (and mind-bending) list of the transcription work he did as a young man in Weimar—a fraction of all his work like this!

Weimar concerto transcriptions

(3rd column: p = pedaliter/organ; m = manualiter/harpsichord) ³

BWV	Key		Model	P 280	Other Ms.	BDW
592	G major	p	Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar : Violin Concerto in G major [ scores ]	11	P 804/31 D-LEb Peters Ms. 11	00674
592a	G major	m	Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar : Violin Concerto in G major [ scores ]; BWV 592		D-LEm Poel. mus. Ms. 29/1	00675
593	A minor	p	Vivaldi , Op. 3 No. 8: Concerto in A minor for two violins and strings, RV 522		P 400b	00676
594	C major	p	Vivaldi , RV 208: Violin Concerto in D major Grosso Mogul		P 400c D-LEu N.I.5137 and 5138	00677
595	C major	p	Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar : Violin Concerto in C major [ scores ], first movement, and/or BWV 984 /1		P 286/6	00678
596	D minor	p	Vivaldi , Op. 3 No. 11: Concerto in D minor for two violins, cello and strings, RV 565		P 330 (autograph)	00679
972	D major	m	Vivaldi , Op. 3 No. 9: Violin Concerto in D major, RV 230; BWV 972a	1	P 804/55	01149
972a	D major	m	Vivaldi , Op. 3 No. 9: Violin Concerto in D major, RV 230		B-Bc 25448 MSM/3	01150
973	G major	m	Vivaldi , RV 299: Violin Concerto in G major (published as Op. 7 No. 8)	2	P 804/54 D-LEm Poel. mus. Ms. 29/4	01151
974	D minor	m	Marcello, A. : Oboe Concerto in D minor	3	P 804/4 D-DS Mus. ms. 66	01152
975	G minor	m	Vivaldi , RV 316 (variant RV 316a, Violin Concerto in G minor, published as Op. 4 No. 6)	4		01153
976	C major	m	Vivaldi , Op. 3 No. 12: Violin Concerto in E major, RV 265	5	P 804/15	01154
977	C major	m		6	P 804/56	01155
978	F major	m	Vivaldi , Op. 3 No. 3: Violin Concerto in G major, RV 310	7		01156
979	B minor	m	Vivaldi , RV 813: Violin Concerto in D minor (formerly RV Anh. 10 attributed to Torelli )	8		01157
980	G major	m	Vivaldi , RV 383: Violin Concerto in B-flat major, (variant RV 383a published as Op. 4 No. 1)	9		01158
981	C minor	m	Marcello, B. : Concerto Op. 1 No. 2	10	B-Bc 25448 MSM/4 P 801/28 D-LEb Peters Ms. 8/29	01159
982	B♭ major	m	Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar : Concerto Op. 1 No. 1	12		01160
983	G minor	m			P 804/35 D-LEm Poel. mus. Ms. 29/3	01161
984	C major	m	Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar : Violin Concerto in C major [ scores ] and possibly BWV 595		P 804/52 D-LEm Poel. mus. Ms. 29/2 D-LEb Peters Ms. 8/28	01162
985	G minor	m	Telemann : Violin Concerto in G minor, TWV 51:g1 [ scores ]		P 804/28	01163
986	G major	m			P 804/46	01164
987	D minor	m	Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar : Concerto Op. 1 No. 4		P 804/34	01165

But Bach, more keenly than anyone (since he had absolute perfect pitch) would have “heard” the vast difference in those two minor keys.

So, like all great art, even if we cannot completely comprehend what is going on, let us preserve our reverence for that opportunity to try.

About Robert Aubry Davis