La juventud como etapa del ciclo vital y como grupo social

It is clear from the last section that we have twelve major keys and, as I

will explain later, they are all emotionally identical: one key will merely have the same pattern of notes moved up or down a bit in pitch. So let’s return to the question of why we have so many keys.

Composers and musicians are in a continual battle against boredom—

not their own boredom, but the boredom of their listeners. They know very well that if they bore you their income will drop and their children will starve—or, at least, they won’t be able to go out for a burger on Wednesday. Music is a form of entertainment and so it has to stimulate the emotions—from jollity to fear (and if you think fear is a bit of an extreme claim for music, you haven’t seen the shower scene from Hitchcock’s film Psycho).

One of the ways a composer can keep up the interest level of his listeners is to change key—from one set of seven notes to another. If this happens, one or more of the notes is changed, and the listener can tell that the team leader of the group has also changed. This team analogy is particularly helpful here: imagine you are the manager of a team whose style of play becomes a bit stale during the first half of a game. At half-time you can put extra life into the team by exchanging a couple of players for substitutes and asking the team to vote in a new captain.

So now you have a slightly different team with a new team leader—

which is exactly what happens if you change key in the middle of a piece of music. You might think that a non-musician would not be able to spot the change in team leader (or key note) but, in straightforward Western music such as pop, rock, folk, blues and most of the classical music written between 1700 and 1900, the key note is fairly easy to spot, even for an untrained listener. In more complicated music, such as modern classical or jazz, the team leader, and therefore the key of the music, may shift about every few seconds or may be deliberately hidden. In this case, the sense of a key becomes confused or lost.

When we are listening to a piece of straightforward music we identify the key note in two ways, although you probably won’t realize or notice that you are doing it. First, a song or any other piece of music is divided

up into phrases and the key note will often be the final one of a phrase. If you play just about any pop song—even one you haven’t heard before—

you will be able to hum the key note within a minute or so. Just pretend that the tune is ending and hum the note it should end on—that will almost certainly be the key note. Our old favorite “Baa Baa Black Sheep”

does this: it hits the key note on the word “full” and the final word,

“lane.”

The other clue which helps to identify the team leader is how often the various notes of the scale occur as the melody progresses—and here we come to an example of musicological fortitude above and beyond the call of duty. Brett Arden of Ohio State University spent many months checking thousands of melodies (more than 65,000 melody notes for the major keys and more than 25,000 for the minor keys) to find out exactly how often each of the notes in a scale occurs. For example, if we number the notes from 1 (the key note) to 7 (the “almost there” note), he found that, in major keys, note 5 occurs most frequently and will be played about four times as often as note 7, the least common member of the group. There are other relationships which hold true for most tunes. For example, in a major key, notes 1, 3 and 5 make up almost 60 percent of the head count of notes in a tune. Your brain recognizes these proportions and this helps us to tell which note the key is based upon. Obviously, you are not aware of your brain analyzing these relationships. You just pick up these clues subconsciously, as you do when you assess which of the guilty-looking eight-year-old ruffians in your garden just kicked the football through the kitchen window…

The most common type of modulation is to change from the key you are in to a key which contains only one different note.

For example, we could be playing away in the key of C major, which contains the following notes:

C, D, E, F, G, A, B.

And we could easily shift over to the key of G major:

G, A, B, C, D, E, F#,

which has the same notes, except the F has been changed for an F sharp.

If we do this, the music receives an emotional lift because one of the notes has been raised. We also get extra (subconscious) interest because the key has changed and we can sense the change of team leader—from C to G.

On the other hand, we could change from C major to F major, which contains all the same notes as C except for the fact that the B is taken down a semitone to B flat. In this case we often get the impression that the emotional intensity of the music has switched down a gear, although we still get the enhanced interest from the change in team leader.

This “up a gear” or “down a gear” effect has nothing to do with the actual properties of G major or F major—the different keys have no intrinsic emotional shading. It’s the process of change which gives us the emotional impact, and the effect fades off quite rapidly (within a few tens of seconds). Imagine yourself standing in a big hamster wheel—it has been stationary for a while and you’re bored, so you take a single step forward onto the next rung. Everything gets a lot more interesting for a little while, but soon the step you moved to becomes the one at the bottom of the wheel and it’s all boring and stationary again. Stepping backward onto the rung behind you has a slightly different effect—but it’s still transitory. The rungs are identical: it’s the changeovers which are interesting. If you want to keep life stimulating you are going to have to keep changing rungs.

Composers occasionally inject a surge of interest by shifting several rungs at once—to a key which has a lot of different notes in it—from C major to E major, for example. Ravel does this as a dramatic flourish near the end of his Boléro. But most often, keys change to a neighboring key (one with only one different note).

Modulating a repeated phrase to a key that is a semitone or a tone above the one you start in (shifting up from B major to C major, for example) never fails to brighten the music because it feels like a change in gear, which is why it has become known as the “truck driver’s gear change” or “truck driver’s modulation.” The technique also revels in the name “the cheese modulation” (“cheese” being the general name given to pop music which has passed its “best before” date).

This modulation is commonly used to give a sudden lift in energy to pop songs, particularly in cases where the chorus is repeated a lot. “I Just Called to Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder uses this technique a couple of times, but the most notable example occurs when the title of the song is repeated, three and a half minutes into the track. Another very effective example of this type of modulation can be found in “Man in the Mirror”

by Michael Jackson. In this case, the key change occurs (as Michael sings the appropriate word) two minutes and fifty seconds into the song.

If a modulation involves movement between two major keys or two minor keys, any change in mood will be short-lived, because the effect is linked to the action of changing—you are just changing rungs on the hamster wheel. If, however, you change from a major key to a minor one (or vice versa) the change in mood will remain in place. This is because, although the effect will be strongest just after the change, you have genuinely moved from one musical landscape to another—like jumping from a steel hamster wheel to one made of wood. Changing from a major key to a minor one will result in a more complex, emotional or sad mood and a move in the other direction will make the music sound more determined and self-assured.

If you change key very often (as some jazz and classical composers do), then the listener may become rather confused and the music will sound a little unstable. If, on the other hand, you don’t do this often enough (like some pop bands), the music can become very predictable and bland.

The same team of notes can sound minor or major if