Iskender Savasir wrote:

>I am not denying that the (post)romantic asthetics of expression has had
>(and continues to have) a liberating effect... to give a personal example...
>For some time I have been meaning to ask a question concerning "the meaning
>of D-Minor" to the list and have not been able to do so, because I haven't
>yet found a way to formulate the question in a way that is i) acceptable to
>me, ii)is acceptable to the stardards that I attribute to the list. Looked
>at from a purely expressionistic view of aesthetics this is no doubt a
>shame; but on the other hand, I enjoy my self(?)-imposed restraint.

I don't know if D-minor has any universal "meaning" but I am aware that
at different times and periods in music history, certain modes and keys
carried certain emotional baggage ...  and might even have been signals
for certain emotional shortcuts.

For me, there has always been one very meaningful D minor place that always
raises goosebumps:  it is the famous Mozart string quartet K.421, and it
is the ONLY quartet in the famous ten that is set in the minor mode.

In the past, I've casually addressed the question of key choice by talking
about the characteristics of the string family,(only because I'm more
familiar with strings.)

Certain keys resonate more than others because of the acoustic properties
of the instruments.  Open string keys (E,A,D,G,C) are much brighter than
other keys.  It's no accident that Mendelssohn's violin concerto is in E
minor, Bach used A and E for some of his concerti, Beethoven and Brahms
chose D Major for theirs.

Another thing composers consider is the tessatura:  where most of the
melody lies.  Stravinsky, in Rites of Spring, demonstrates the extreme
range of the bassoon.  If he had chosen a higher pitched instrument, say
an English Horn, the effect would have been quite different, even though
the notes would have been the same.  This, too, adds an emotional effect
(although I hesitate to say what the effect would be on an individual ...
I don't LIKE to think there is a one-to-one correspondence of key or range
to one particular emotion that can be named.)

So your question is indeed a good one, and very subtle.

An easy test of the power of key and range that is easy to do for yourself
is to listen to two recordings of the same Baroque work; a HIP performance
and a conventional performance.  The HIP orchestra is tuned lower than the
conventional, so you might be able to hear a difference in brightness, tone
quality and balance between the two performances.  How you interpret that
emotionally is up to you.

Mimi Ezust