A minor second
- April 30th, 2018
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A minor second is the musical term for the two notes that are next to each other on the 12 note ‘chromatic’ scale. The descriptions in this series of posts are of the changes I am experiencing as my auditory apparatus and my brain are moving all my hearing of music up a minor second – or a semitone, the term I have used in these posts till now.
My use of the term ‘minor second’ in this post represents my marking of a significant milestone in this journey. The odl note is gone; the new note one step up has taken over. Colonised first and now wiped out the original inhabitant. Genocide.
In the last month or two, a majority of pieces in my weak keys (those that have been most prone to the gradual change I have been describing)Â now start out in the new key, a minor second up from their written key. There is now no equivocation, no variation. From the first note or chord, the pieces are in their new key and there they remain. The first piece to do this, I noted, was Elgar’s Salut d’Amor. F major instead of the E major he chose as the key of love for his wife. E major has been in the vanguard of these changes, but is no longer alone in being a ‘lost’ key.
Yet all is not lost. It will be lost, but it is not yet. Yesterday I started listening to the Finale of Dvorak’s New World Symphony half way through. The recapitulation of the slow second subject on the celli was in F major. It should have been in E major, but I was not surprised at how I heard it. Yet when Dvorak had returned to E minor, the symphony’s key, in the Coda, I heard it as E minor. TO end the symphony he switches from the minor to the major. E major stuck till the end of the movement – a feature i have noted before, and has not (yet) changed.
By chance the next piece on the FMR playlist was a Mozart aria from Don Giovanni. The soprano sang brilliantly in E major. But I knew that she was cheating – well, she wasn’t, my brain was: Mozart wrote it in E flat major. This borrowed E major I don’t want. It is a minor second fake.