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Subtle

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Wycliff Ndua
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16 views2 pages

Subtle

class work notes

Uploaded by

Wycliff Ndua
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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We now touch upon an ongoing debate among music theorists.

In principle, all keys with the same sequence of


intervals—the same scale—are equivalent to one another
and should sound the same to the ear. It makes no difference
if you hum Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in, say, C
major or in F- sharp major; the melody will sound exactly
the same. This is because most people are sensitive only
to relative pitch—to the interval between two notes—but
not to their actual, absolute pitch.
But you may have noticed the qualifier “in principle” at
the beginning of the preceding paragraph, and I added it
for a number of reasons. First, the quality of sound of musical
instruments is not uniform over their entire range,
but varies significantly depending on which register, or
group of notes, is being played. The clarinet, for example,
has a rich, mellow, lower register, while higher notes
sound distinctly shrill. Second, those few among us who
are blessed (some would say cursed) with absolute pitch
can easily detect if a note is out of tune by as little as
one- sixteenth of a tone; consequently, they may feel that
something is wrong if a piece is played in a key other than
its designated key. And last, the ear itself responds differently
to different frequency ranges: it is the least sensitive
at both the lower threshold of audibility (about 20
Hz) and the upper threshold, about 20,000 Hz for young
people and half as much for older folks. All these factors
introduce subtle parameters into the equation and often
play a role in the composer’s choice of a specific key.
𝄓
With the beginning of the Romantic period in music
around 1800, keys began to be associated with various
emotional attributes. Qualities such as “bright,” “heroic,”

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