This resume of where my pitch and key perception are in their process of inevitable change continues with a single clear feature. There is a marked tendency for a piece of music that begins sounding in the correct key to have shifted to the key a semitone above by the time it ends. Thus this week on FMR the first movement of Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony began its story boldly in E flat major. I became aware that things had shifted in the recapitulation section and it all ended in a bold but false E major.

This process is not uniform. On Thursday Mendelssohn’s 2nd Piano Concerto ended as consistently in a D key as it had begun. Same radio station, same car radio, same pair of ears, same brain as for the Schumann.