What Key Are You?

What dark matter is to astrophysicists, is what musical key characteristics are to musicians. It's a bit of black magic wrapped up inside a gooey delicious cookie just out of the oven. So who's to say what tastes good when it comes to sharps and flats? Answer: you!

Certain musical keys are thought to induce certain emotions. For example (get ready for a really long reference), from Christian Schubart's Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1806) translated by Rita Steblin in A History of Key Characteristics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries (no kidding?), the Key of C denotes a feeling "Completely pure. Its character is: innocence, simplicity, naïvety, children's talk." Of course not everyone hears it the same way. According to Charpentier's Regles de Composition ca. 1682, the Key of C is "gay and warlike."

F# Major indicates "a gloomy key: it tugs at passion as a dog biting a dress. Resentment and discontent are its language." Ask any violinist to play you a tune in such a key and you are asking for trouble. Simply put, it is an evil key; a key which-must-not-be-named (or played).

Eb Major is "the key of love, of devotion, of intimate conversation with God."

Ab minor (and miner) is a "grumbler, heart squeezed until it suffocates; wailing lament, difficult struggle; in a word, the color of this key is everything struggling with difficulty."

Some of my favorite keys are: E major/minor and A Major, ranging from grief to magnificence and splendor. Schubert likened E minor "unto a maiden robed in white with a rose-red bow on her breast." Whoa Schubert, TMI!

In addition to emotion, some have even gone so far as to label keys with colors. No, this is not a drawback to the sixties or shunning those who are color-blind, it's about our sixth sense: food. I bet a lot of early composers got hungry and probably did some of their best work against the petition of a growling tummy. So logically, their eyes would begin to play tricks on them after a while and without warning the Chiquita banana girl with her cornucopia of mouth-watering fruits would leap onto the page and influence the key. A sly green apple? A Major. A humongous juicy watermelon? C Major, etc etc. And thus proves the super commutative property of music: food = color = emotion = music.