From: Nye Parry ()
Date: May 14, 2008
Subject:
Re: Cognitive Daily - major vs minor
absolutely! all very silly
incidentally I recently asked my Balinese Gamelan teacher if he found
gamelan Angklung (that jaunty stuff withe the prominent major(ish)
third) sad
Very! (in bali it is associated primarily with cremations)
N
2008/5/14 Richard Dobson :
> Peter Castine wrote:
>>
>> On 14-May-2008, at 14:39, Kevin Austin wrote:
>>
>>> Perhaps the listeners could have been trained to recognize them as red or
>>> blue tunes.
>>
>> Socialist vs. Capitalist?
>>
>> I've always found the happy/sad dichotomy unsatisfactory, otoh I recall
>> that the very first piano school that I learned from used precisely that
>> metaphor to explain major/minor. Can 50,000,000 John Thompson pupils be
>> wrong?
>>
>
> Tempo matters.
>
> As a fluteplayer, my standard example of an almost universally-agreed
> (objectively?) non-sad minor piece is the final Badinerie of the JSB B-Minor
> Suite. Then there is Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream - fast, G minor,
> magical, mysterious even, but hardly sad.
>
> An interesting exercise is to imagine a major version of the Badinerie (get
> some students to do just that). Chances are, it would sound "banal".
> Minorizing often has the effect of debanalification.
>
>
>
> Richard Dobson
>
>
>