Freeform Forum: Why is the Songline in e-flat minor?

When I came back from Australia in 2005, I was profoundly changed.  I had wanted to go there since I was seven, thanks to good marketing from the Australian Tourism Board.  25 years later, I made it there and the country lived up to my probably-unrealistic expectations. This is what was so profound; whatever I imagined and whatever I hoped for, Australia delivered.

In January of 2006, I had added writing more to my list of New Year's Resolutions.  So I decided to blog.  Yet, I needed a name and a concept.  Being so moved by Australia, I continued to do my research into the country, culture, colonization and Aborigines.  I was impressed that Aboriginal beliefs are the longest, continuous belief system in the history of man.  One tenet of this is the songline, a path across the land or sky that which marks the route of a creator-being during his creation process.  The way to connect with a songline is to go on walkabout to find and travel along that route that is personally meaningful to you.  I understood it as correlating with our idea of déjà vu but not exactly déjà vu.  Yet it explains the connection or the feeling that I get when I travel... that I've been there before... or I already feel that I fit in and know where I am... or there's something outside of me that moves me forward.

I wanted to show respect to the Aboriginal belief system of Dreamtime and acknowledge that I related to the idea of songlines. I took the concepts in and I made them into something more relatable for Americans.  That’s where the idea of adding a key signature to the title of my blog came into play.

I didn’t have a key signature in mind when I started.  Yet one day, I was at my folks’ house and I sat at the piano and started to play chords.  I paid attention to both the sound on the chord and the feel of the chord as I played – the shape of my hand and the sensation of the keys against my fingertips.

The C-major chord was a bright sound but uninteresting in form. I moved on to minor chords and quickly landed on the e-flat minor key.  It was mysterious in tone and fascinating in form.  It was the first chord that I tried that used all the ebony keys.  I kept playing it.  I liked it.  It became the key signature I wanted to add into the title of my blog.

It turns out that e-flat minor is a rare key in orchestral music, used mostly to modulate. It is encountered in piano pieces with most of those pieces being written by Russian composers. In more popular music versus classical, the key is often employed by jazz or blues artists since the key used all the black keys allowing for an easily playable blues scale.

So I googled "e-flat minor" and found this, by a Russian composer - Alexei Vladimirovich Stanchinsky.  It’s an amazing piece and you can follow along with the sheet music in the video.


I hear and feel melancholy, spirituality and the great and deep feeling that Gary Goldschneider, the author of The Secret Language of Birthdays: Personology Profiles for Each Day of the Year, noticed as the traits of compositions in that key.

Of course, I dug a little deeper and found that Madonna's "Secret" was also written in the key of e-flat minor.


It took me a while to warm up to "Secret" but as I listened to the entire album and more singles were released this song became a favorite.

"Happiness [does lie] in your own hands."