F sharp minor

[greg]

So why the name? Favourite key? You must know plenty of works...please do share 

haha actually i just changed my name to annoy D Minor 

F# minor works..... let's see...... uh, can't really think of anything really. Not a very common key, plus i don't usually keep track of what key works are in....... i am working on an Yngwie Malmsteen song, Far Beyond the Sun, for guitar, i don't think that would count though. Funny cuz now i'm starting to play through that scale when i never would before.

[Kullervo]

Dear god, what is that disgusting homunculus thing in the middle?

[greg]

Dear god, what is that disgusting homunculus thing in the middle?

it's a new character, i don't remember him/her.

ok, here it is:

Riff

Riff (referred as Cousin Riff by Baby Bop) is an orange six year old hadrosaur, who is Baby Bop and BJ's cousin. He has appeared since the 2006 season. He wears green sneakers. His theme is "I Hear Music Everywhere." Riff loves music and it's in almost everything he does. In Barney - Let's Go to the Firehouse, it was revealed that Riff also likes to invent things and he created a 4 sound smoke detector (the first 3 were different smoke alarm sounds, the final one was his own voice).

"I Hear Music Everywhere,
I Hear Music in your Underwear." 

ok, i doubt those are the lyrics.....

[BachQ]

it's a new character, i don't remember him/her.

ok, here it is:
"I Hear Music Everywhere,
I Hear Music in your Underwear." 

ok, i doubt those are the lyrics.....

"Riff" would make a fine screen name for you, Greg .........

[greg]

"Riff" would make a fine screen name for you, Greg .........

it would...... before i found out that ugly orange piece of crap in that picture's name is Riff. 

[greg]

ok, i picked a better name now

[Ten thumbs]

However I'm primarily looking for choral works. So any help/thoughts would be appreciated!

I thought there was a catch as there are plenty of piano pieces in this key. Vocal music is more difficult as it usually identified by a title and the key is rarely given. That means you need either perfect pitch or the score in front of you.

[prémont]

A=400, equal tuning. Does this mean your stance might be that there can be no characteristic different to any other key?

A=440, equal tuning I suppose, you mean.
Yes, given these circumstances the characteristics of any key is equalled, the only important remaining factor being the instrument specific characteristics. g minor sounds cf course different from f sharp minor on a violin, the strings of which are tuned gdae. On keyboard instruments in equal tuning, there is no difference in key character.

[Mystery]

 On keyboard instruments in equal tuning, there is no difference in key character.
[/quote]

I completely disagree! I really think Schubert's Gb Impromptu, for example, is definitely a 'flat' piece and not in F sharp major. I have no idea as to how this is possible, but I think it nonetheless!

[prémont]

On keyboard instruments in equal tuning, there is no difference in key character.


I completely disagree! I really think Schubert's Gb Impromptu, for example, is definitely a 'flat' piece and not in F sharp major. I have no idea as to how this is possible, but I think it nonetheless!

Maybe a proof that we hear what we expect to hear.

[lukeottevanger]

Maybe a proof that we hear what we expect to hear.

No, the point really is that Schubert chose G flat rather than F sharp (or indeed rather than any other key). Why? Because it fitted his 'feel' of the piece. G flat, associatively, is a very relaxed, luxuriant key - and this fits perfectly the velvety, 'deep' nature of this particular piece under the fingers. At other times Schubert opts for extreme sharp keys for similar reasons - for instance, the end of the slow movement of the last Sonata (the B flat) goes into C sharp major, not D flat (even though that key is more clearly related to B flat) because C sharp has associations of transfiguration and generally 'aspiring upwards' which are relevant to this piece, a kind of celestial lullaby. The slow movement of the String Quintet is another very interesting example....

But I've been through all this many times on this and previous boards. There are always those who try to make the 'emperor's new clothes point' that all ET keys sound the same, that there is therefore no sounding difference between them except that of absolute height, and that those who talk about differences are therefore deluding themselves. To which the response is - it's true, of course, that ET eliminates acoustical differences, but this view in its rigid factuality doesn't address the way composers' minds work. There is no avoiding the fact that composers chose one key over all others, that there must be a reason for this choice (though often subconscious) and that in broad terms trends can be spotted. It doesn't matter if piece X doesn't conform to the trend, as people like to point out (though in fact usually, when one looks deep enough, it turns out that piece X does conform to one aspect of the trend - this is a complex and multifaceted area). The real point is that to composer' s associations (and to performers) are there, and they lie behind the particular tone of many a work. I'd go further and say that a majority of tonal works subscribe in some degree or other (note italics) to the associations (and even atonal music pays heed to them - which is why so much Schoenberg seems to hover around D minor....)

In the case of F sharp minor (one of my favourite keys!): in the Classical repertoire it is a rare key, reserved for special ocasions - and pieces that use it are usually correspondingly special. In Mozart's case, the slow movement of K488 is the only movement he wrote in the key - and the music itself has a particular tone unique to it. The two facts are not unconnected. (It's one of Mozart's most beautiful movements, of course.) Speaking of Schubert - there is an exceptional slow movement in F sharp minor in one of the A major sonatas which also stands out for its rarified tone. Its opening, though in many ways different from the Mozart, shares a sparse and remote simplicity. It is obvious that this is what both Mozart and Schubert had in mind - these movements are very different from the other slow movements in comparable works - and it is striking that they both chose F sharp minor for this music (or that what they wrote was conditioned by their chosing F sharp minor beforehand).

[Cato]

When I was composing music, I rarely used normal scales, but F# minor did appear more often than not, and if I had been alive in the 19th century, I would have used that key quite a bit.

So, yes, it is also my favorite key!

Why?

I am afraid one hits a wall with such questions: why do you like/dislike gingerbread?

The only thing I can say is that the sound of the key attracts me: I am also partial to B minor, and E Phrygian, 9-tone scales, not to mention scales of 19-tones with either third-tones or quarter-tones.

Something expressive yet inscrutable, something of an echo of the mysteries of existence, reveals itself to me in those sounds, assuming that the melodies involved are of some interest. 

I believe Rimsky-Korsakov liked F# minor, but am not able to verify that right now.

Scriabin's  Piano Concerto is in F# minor.

[Mystery]

Thank you for all your comments. As I am doing a big study on it, as many opinions as possible would be appreciated!

What about the fact that there are only 11 Bach chorales (out of 371) in F sharp minor? Interesting? Very much so in my opinion, especially as there are at least 30 in A major. Please can someone explain why some have the usual three sharps and a couple only have two? I know that some Baroque music was written with one fewer sharp/flat (in the key signature) but not sure why. Any help?

[Mystery]

We must not forget, too, that out of 104 symphonies, Haydn only wrote one in F sharp minor. And this was the Farewell. Very interesting... furthermore, only once in his 45 piano trios, and one string quartet out of eighty-plus!

[Kullervo]

Recent discovery: Bridge's Phantasy piano quartet is in F# Minor.

[Ten thumbs]

A composer's attitude to this key may be observable if he or she wrote a set of 24 preludes (and/or fugues). No8 is usually in F# minor. Possibly it is highly charged because F# is a tritone above C.
Fanny Hensel did not write a set of preludes but her Capriccio from the 1836-7 piano book is in F# minor. She also uses it for the prelude in March from 'Das Jahr', which represents Easter. This ends on what to me is the 'crucifixion' chord, being G# g# c#1 e1 a1 fx2.

[prémont]

No, the point really is that Schubert chose G flat rather than F sharp (or indeed rather than any other key). Why? Because it fitted his 'feel' of the piece. G flat, associatively, is a very relaxed, luxuriant key - and this fits perfectly the velvety, 'deep' nature of this particular piece under the fingers.

Not understood. Played on a piano tuned in equal tuning Fis-major and Ges-major are without difference in sound. So doesn´t this exactly confirm, that you hear what you expect to hear?

[lukeottevanger]

From a performer's perspective, and perhaps a listener's one, I think you are right - if a performer (and sometimes a listener) is immersed in the repertoire (as the former should be), they will have built up an expectation of what particular keys 'mean' and presumably could sometimes make a piece fit their expectations of its key, as you are suggesting. A good example, as I suggest below, is Debussy's Clair de lune, whose veiled, slightly cloying romantic quality feels perfectly fitted to its D flat notation, but which would probably feel - very differently but just as fittingly - 'celestial', if notated in C sharp major.

But in the event, though it is possible, I just don't think this happens very much - I tend to think that performers and composers work within the same traditions and therefore think along the same fundamental lines, so that performers aren't misascribing sentiments to a piece in F sharp which the composer didn't intend - the composer almost certainly intended them just as much. If this theory held - that performers hear the music in a particular way only because they expect to  - we could still expect that now and then a performer would feel that the composer's choice of key jarred somewhat with what the performer expected. But I would suggest that this hardly ever happens, because, as I say, both composer and performer are working from within that same tradition. Speaking personally, the fact is that when playing a piece by an established composer working within the great tradition I have never felt that the key and the tone of the piece jar, because these composers tend to be ultra-sensitive to issues of 'what keys mean'. But when playing pieces by composition students who don't have much real experience of the tradition, who haven't lived with and played through the great music of the past, this matter of key choice - does the key fit the tone of the music? - is very often one of the first things that jars hideously, even before we get down to the notes themselves. I think the contrast is very telling here - it tells us a lot about how important that tradition is.

To be honest, for me this issue is most usefully discussed not in terms of the POV of the listener, and only slightly more in terms of the POV of the performer; really it is interesting in terms of the POV of the composer, who as listeners we tend to ignore too much! We aren't always interested enough in why a composer made this or that decision, and we should be because 1) it tells us so much about the music as it exists and 2) in a fundamental way these basic decisions are what made it possible for the music we love to be written. So, the interesting thing for me is perhaps best phrased as a question - given that performed on an ET piano these two keys are the same, acoustically and 'under-the-fingers', what made Schubert choose one over the other? That's impossible to answer, of course, if you don't go further than saying 'but they are the same.' There has to be some factor, however small, which made him swing towards writing his music out in G flat rather than F sharp. And because everything else measurable, quite literally, and as you yourself imply, is equal, what remains as answer to this question can only be something unmeasurable and psychological - the associations which G flat for Schubert had as composed to those which F sharp had. Never mind if the listener has these associations, never mind if we are aware of them or not - Schubert evidently had them (as did the vast majority of tonal composers, and even atonal ones) and they are partly to thank for things like this piece and many others.

In this case, I think it is fairly clear - the tone of this piece is that which I described above: velvety, luxurious, possibly even slightly lazy, certainly very human. These are qualities traditionally associated with the flat side of things, especially the extreme flat side of things. Though the piece would have sounded and (importantly) felt identical notated in F sharp, that key's associations wouldn't quite have fitted the tone of what Schubert wrote here, so that though the physical effect under the fingers would be the same, the effect in the performers mind is totally different - to me as someone who plays the piece, the G flat Impromptu has something of a decadent, hedonistic edge to it (note the deep trills which tell you that something is stirring deep beneath); notated in F sharp major it would feel different, the new key would suggest something more serene and less luxurious but now those trills would be out of place, I think. At this point we return to your main point - yes, I would certainly be fitting the piece to my expectations of F sharp major if I read it in this way... but the fact that I think certain of the piece's features might be jarring in this enharmonic key tends to support the fact that G flat was associatively the only right choice here.

Like other extreme sharp keys, F sharp used in a slow, quiet piece as is this G flat Impromptu is a more transfigured, possibly heavenly key, often quite unruffled by 'human' disturbances - I refer again to the transfiguring C sharp major lullaby at the end of the slow movement of the last piano sonata, to Schumann's F sharp Romanze, which is also some sort of lullaby, or to some of Messiaen's pieces in this key, especially in the Vingt Regards, where it is, as far as it can be, the tonic key of the whole work, and reserved for moment of cosmic stillness (again, notably, a lullaby is amongst them). Debussy's Clair de lune, in D flat (not C sharp) has a kind of soft, veiled edge (gentle moonlight, not starshine) because of the flat key chosen; but his La terrasse des audiences du clair du lune is given a glinting, exotic (= transfigured) edge by being notated in F sharp, not G flat (Debussy likes sharp keys for his exotic excursions, as in Iberia, Soiree dans Grenade etc.); OTOH, sticking with the Preludes, La fille aux cheveux de lin is in G flat, not F sharp, and this fits its more lyrical, homely tone.

[BachQ]

(and even atonal music pays heed to them - which is why so much Schoenberg seems to hover around D minor....)

You make such an important point, yet you relegate this to a parenthetical afterthought .........

[Ten thumbs]

Strangely, I used to have an edition of that Gb impromptu in G, presumably intended for beginners. I say strangely because it is annoyingly more difficult to play on the white notes than the black (not that I really want to). As pointed out, the choice between Gb and F# by a composer seems natural in the context he has chosen. Often this is due to ease of movement to related keys and avoiding difficult accidentals. Note that Schubert found it necessary to cancel the key signature entirely for a bar and a half. In F# he might have been tempted to leave the F# standing. I know a piece that seems right in F# - it has a feeling of contentment and repose and also a turbulent middle section, in F# minor.