We all love This Is Spin̈al Tap, but you’re not supposed to take it literally.
Nevertheless, this very silly Rolling Stone article tries to prove Nigel right. The author is a doctoral student in quantitative methods. She should probably have asked a music theorist about this before publishing it, or really any musical person. I won’t go through everything wrong that’s in here, just a few high (low) points.
First, let’s dispense with the idea that D minor is intrinsically sad. Here’s a song in D minor.
Here’s another one.
And another one.
There are so many different aspects of music that go into its emotional valence other than harmony: rhythm, melodic shape, timbre. Some of the saddest music you will ever hear is in major keys.
But so, let’s stipulate that minor keys do tend to be sadder in general than major ones. It is simply untrue that any particular minor key is sadder than any other. In twelve-tone equal temperament (12-TET), all the minor keys feel the same (as do all the major keys, and all the modal keys, and all the blues keys.) The keys are all at different absolute pitch heights, but absolute pitch doesn’t make a difference in musical meaning. The important thing in music is the ratios between the frequencies, and in 12-TET, those are all identical across keys, by definition. D minor is the same as D-flat minor the way that level three of a parking garage is the same as level four. This drawing by Roger Penrose gives you the idea:
I have been getting responses to this post that say, okay, but absolute pitch height affects timbre, and that affects how the music makes you feel. True! But that has nothing to do with the supposedly intrinsic qualities of the keys. It’s easy to demonstrate that with a thought experiment. If you have a song in C and you transpose it up a tritone to F-sharp, it will sound much “brighter.” If you transpose it down a tritone to F-sharp, it will sound much “darker.” Does that mean that F-sharp is “brighter” or “darker” than C? Both and neither.
But Ethan, you say. I’ve seen all these lists showing the moods of different keys, like this one for example. It’s true! Historically, European composers did think of the keys as having different moods, and for a good reason: before 12-TET became the standard Western tuning system, the keys all did actually sound different. And I mean really different, not just in absolute pitch height, but with differences in the ratios between the frequencies as well. The reasons are technical, but the bottom line is that in historical tuning systems, C would have been perfectly in tune, and the further you got from C on the circle of fifths, the more out of tune everything became. So when Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier, the prelude and fugue in C would have sounded much “nicer” than the ones in C-sharp or F-sharp. Maybe D minor wasn’t “sadder” than D-flat minor, but they would have at least had different qualities to their intervals.
Anyway, that was the past. Today, your choice of key is purely arbitrary. Pop and rock musicians choose keys for practical reasons: to fit the singer’s vocal range, or because different keys are easier to play in, or because of the physical constraints of different instruments. Guitarists prefer E minor to D minor, not because either one is “sadder,” but because E minor sounds better on the guitar (unless you tune in drop D.) Guitarists love E major, for the same reason, but horn players don’t like it, because it’s awkward for them to play in. Keyboard players love E-flat minor pentatonic because it’s just the black keys, but that scale is a major headache on guitar. And so it goes.
Last thing: you should be skeptical of any study purporting to prove anything quantitatively objective about emotion in music, because the art form is highly subjective and context-dependent. One of my favorite klezmer tunes, “Der Gassen Nigun“, is a wedding tune that sounds to me more like a funeral tune. It would make the job of teaching music theory easier if it could be reduced to some objective mathematical formula, but it can’t.
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