Carlos Tabachnik wrote:

>why almost universally, or at least for almost the whole people
> which likes the CM determined melodies produce similar effects?...
>
>...why the minor tonalities are more intimate, darker, perhaps
> sadder than the mayor tonalities?

As another pointed out, these are difficult questions.  My personal opinion
is that we somehow learn to associate certain sounds with certain feelings.
I'm less convinced that there's anything innate to the process (other than
a generalized predisposition to certain sounds), although I would be more
than happy to be proven wrong on this point.

In most tonal music, chords have meanings in context.  If they don't,
or as in the case of some minimalist music, the meanings are different
or absent (you repeat something over and over and it tends to lose its
significance), that doesn't negate the role of context in the traditional
sense.  People brought up on modern rock have an especially impoverished
ear for contextual chord meanings.  (This isn't universally true, however.
The Fugees do a song called "Killing Me Softly" (a cover of an earlier
song) which contains of all things a bona fide Phrygian cadence.  When
I have played this song for Intro to Music classes, many students have
indicated a sensitivity to the chord change at that point.)

And when you're talking about Schubert, the meaning of the chord is
EVERYTHING.  Case in point is the transition to the return of the main
theme in the slow movement of the Great C Major symphony (the passage with
the repeated one-note horn call, around which the string harmonies change
in a most wonderful fashion.) It's no wonder that if you don't have some
sensitivity to these shifts of "meaning" that such music is going to be
lost on you.  In a symphony it is not only the raw impact of a striking
change of harmony, but its strategic location in the form as well.  Another
case in point is from the first movement of the Eroica symphony of
Beethoven, in comparing what the main theme does in the recapitulation
(goes to G Major) vs.  its original statement in the exposition.  Quite
wonderful in itself, but especially so in the light of having heard it do
something else earlier.

The "subjectivity" of such responses is again difficult to judge.  If two
equally musically literate listeners hear the Schubert, are they both going
to "interpret" the feelings the same way? I think so, within reason.  Given
sufficient exposure to the tonal syntax, I think most people will hear
minor as being something very different from major, and assign meanings to
various root relationships just on a statistical basis.  Beyond that, each
person is going to bring something of his or her own personality to an
interpretation of the meaning of the work.

Chris Bonds