The Character Of Keys

Weblogger and print arts journalist Terry Teachout of About Last Night has up a nifty post concerning a phenomenon which has forever been for me both of keen interest and a bugaboo: the extra-musical character of keys (the musical sort, that is). Writes Mr. Teachout:

I mentioned the other day that Dvorak’s String Sextet was written in “A major, that most divinely innocent of keys."

[...]

Since I experience the expressive qualities of keys as something like a cross between a color and an emotion, “hating” the key of E minor would be like hating, say, dark blue-green, a notion that strikes me as alien but not altogether absurd (one might well speak of "hating" fear, just as you might hate the taste of cauliflower). In any case, other musicians have had prejudices similar to that of Billy Joel: Sviatoslav Richter, the great Russian pianist, mentioned more than once in his diary that he disliked the key of F minor.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I had perfect pitch when I was a working musician, but that I lost it when I stopped playing an instrument regularly and fell out of touch with the physical materials of music-making. I still have perfect relative pitch, but my mental key center has sagged a half-step. Ask me to sing an A and I’ll sing an A-flat (unless I stop to think about it, in which case I’ll remember to transpose the note I hear in my head up a half-step to compensate). Nevertheless, the Dvorak String Sextet still sounds innocent to me.

I sometimes wonder whether lay listeners who lack this kind of perceptual sensitivity might possibly experience music in more or less the same way that an achromatically color-blind person (that is, someone who sees the world in black and white) experiences visual stimuli, at least when compared to someone like me. To be sure, I’m not a synaesthete: I don’t see specific colors when I hear specific sounds. I do, however, experience key signatures and harmonies in a way I take to be analogous to the perception of color, and because I have perfect relative pitch, this also means that I always “know where I am” when listening to a piece of tonal music.

Yeah. Go ahead. Rub it in. I don't possess perfect pitch (although I once did possess fairly well-developed relative pitch), and hate with an unquenchable hatred all who were born with this rare gift. (The Real Deal is genetic and a life-long possession once "programmed," not correlated in any way with innate musicality or musical gift, and can't be acquired although a useful simulacrum can be developed if one begins developing it early enough in life, and daily uses it. That simulacrum is really a highly developed version of relative pitch, and very much a use-it-or-lose-it deal as perfect pitch is not. Although perfect pitch can go "off pitch" by a precisely measurable degree later in life, it can always be "reprogrammed" to its original accuracy with but a little effort.)

I always comforted myself for that lack of gift by reminding myself, and often, that Leonard Bernstein lacked the gift as well, as did — mirabile dictu! — no less than Richard Wagner himself, if one can believe such a thing. As if to compensate me for my lack, Providence granted me an extremely sensitive sense of pitch accuracy (I can hear a difference of as little as 1 cent — 1/100 of a tempered semitone — in pitch, and a 3-cents difference is annoying beyond endurance), and a curious and unexplainable visualizing sense of musical structure (on hearing even the most complicated new piece for but a second time, and with no recourse to the score, I can automatically visualize as a sort of quasi-picture its internal form with no effort made to do so even though I may not know even so much as the technical name of the form(s) I'm visualizing).

To those of us deprived of perfect pitch, all tempered scales sound exactly alike when played in isolation (but not, I hasten to add, the modes of those scales which sound markedly different, and are immediately identifiable), and a piece transposed from one key to another, and played in isolation (i.e., with no proximate reference to the original key) sounds exactly like the piece played in its original key, or any other key, for that matter.

Oh!, to just once be able to hear those tempered key differences, and experience their different extra-musical characters!