I heard that programme too - I think the first of the series, I've not heard
any others - and it was interesting, but incomplete. He talked about the
supposed intrinsic qualities of D minor as used by several classical
composers, and in some classic rock music, and tried to get to an answer for
the question - is there really some special quality about each key? e.g. is
D minor as used by Beethoven, Bruckner, Haydn etc. more "universally"
tragic, solemn & serious than e.g. G minor, and would the D minor symphonies
have the same emotional effect if e.g. transposed up to E flat minor. BUT he
never mentioned the question of equal vs. unequal temperament, and he never
mentioned the fact that pitch has changed over the centuries so that what we
play as D minor now would have been closer to our C sharp minor in Haydn &
Beethovens's time and to our E flat minor by the end of the 19th century. In
the 18th century and earlier you often got different pitch standard in
different countries. This history of course explains why our "G" pipes,
designed in the late 18th century and not changed much since, play at what
we now call F or nearer F sharp.
Logically, with equal temperament, all keys should sound the same -
composers in earlier times often exploited the effect of unequal
temperament, which made keys sound very different from each other.
Nevertheless, there is a different feel - is it to do with where keys lie in
the range of the voices and/or instruments? Interesting. With NSP, of G
major would sound more natural, because we don't tune them to equal
temperament, and there's the difference of how many keys (metal ones that
is) you have to use to play.
Philip
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gibbons, John" <j.gibb...@imperial.ac.uk>
To: <nsp@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 4:35 PM
Subject: [NSP] Re: Key Matters. Not pipes, but of musical interest
Well spotted.
It's odd maybe that Gmaj on NSP has a similar feel to Gmaj on a flute,
(comfortable, in some sense the native key of the instrument) but
acoustically nearer to Fmaj. How much do these associations depend on the
context?
-----Original Message-----
From: lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu [mailto:lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu] On Behalf
Of tim rolls BT
Sent: 03 February 2010 16:20
To: nsp@cs.dartmouth.edu
Subject: [NSP] Key Matters. Not pipes, but of musical interest
I'm not sure how many people outside the UK will be able to access
this, as it''s a BBC thing and I know there can be problems, but
there's an interesting series of 1/4 hr programmes on the radio this
week called Key Matters.
As links are a problem too I'll type it, go to
bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009yzy3.
Or just look for Key Matters on the Radio 4 section.
Tim
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