"I Ain't Somebody with a lot of Sympathy"

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I can be a brooding guy. I love those moody, sensual, personal songs that get under you skin and stay in your head. Like songs by the Police and Sting.

This gravitation to these songs subconsciously led me to land on the key of E flat minor for the name of my blog.

Gary Goldschneider, the author of The Secret Language of Birthdays: Personology Profiles for Each Day of the Year has also analyzed key signatures:
The key of E flat minor is not used much because of the six flats, including C flat, but it is associated by me with the sign of Cancer, paired with e minor. E minor and E flat minor are keys of melancholy, E minor more so, but E flat minor is a highly spiritualized, inward and emotional key, one of great and deep feeling. Very water, also. There are so few pieces in E flat minor that we can almost name them all in one breath. A prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier (its fugue is in D sharp minor with a hideous number of sharps), a couple of shorter pieces by Brahms, not one sonata in the whole literature, no symphony… It must be a highly personal piece, and not very popular with the audiences. (However, the key of E flat major is the key of the sun and of the sign of Leo. Blazing, warm, radiant and golden. Think of other pieces in E flat, like the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven (number 3), and all the standards originally in that key (concert) like Over the Rainbow, and Misty by Errol Garner. D major is the trumpet key, E flat the key of the French Horn. Get to know the four horn concertos of Mozart, three in E flat and one in D.) Hey, I think I just remembered that Round Midnight is in E flat minor, also.

By the way, about the “beliefs” of certain keys. Like my birthday system, I just look at all the pieces written in any given key, in the entire music literature, and then try to abstract from them what they all have in common. I don’t pull any of this stuff out of the cosmos, but rather just look at the history and factual expression (the pieces of music or birthdays themselves become data for me) and then construct the theory.
Two songs that should be in the keys of E flat minor are Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me a River and What Comes Around … Both of which I got to see in concert this Tuesday at his show.

Both of which I love because they are moody, brooding, infectious and personal.

Comments

Anonymous said…
You saw Justin Timberlake in concert?

Ha! Ha! <--in Nelson voice
14:21
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