Minor Keys - PHH 006

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Now, have you ever thought of your music as having colors of minor? As a different color, perhaps from major? I don't know. Maybe to you, minor is just another key. But to me, minor is special. As a musician, minor keys are how I first learned to listen. Critically, as a teacher, I have seen that minor keys, much more so than major, open the door to understanding about music theory. And as a harpist, I love the creativity that minor gives me, the choices that it gives me. And I love the way it sounds. I love its tonal color.

Now, today we'll talk about the facts of minor, but we'll also talk about its color, what makes minor sound like minor and what makes it sometimes sound almost like major. They are extremely closely related, maybe more closely related than you think, but it's not all, you know, colors and rainbow discussion. Today we'll touch on some very practical things like my three number system for helping you learn your minor keys. Making sense of them Making sense of keys and scales, the five essential minor keys that all harpists need to know and why. I believe that studying minor improves your sight reading, your musical hearing, and your improvisation. Pretty powerful for one little mode, huh? But before we get into all of that, I wanted to let you know that you still still have time to join my free master class, which is happening tonight, and to join our Build Extend advance course at its discounted price until this Friday. So I'll tell you all the details that you need to know about that at the end of the episode because I don't want you to miss that. But for right now, let's start talking minor keys. Let's talk minor keys. I think many people try to learn minor scales and minor key signatures in the abstract without really thinking about why they are that way. And I think that knowing the why not only helps you make more sense of it, but helps you see how closely major and minor are related. In fact, you can really think of major and minor scales that have the same keynote, the same tonic, as being the same scale, but just with a different, different color. And let's talk about that right now. We'll start from major. So a major scale has a particular pattern of whole steps and half steps. It's got five whole steps and two half steps. And the half steps occur between the third and fourth note and the seventh and eighth note. So we have a whole step between. This is a D major scale. So this is a whole step from D to E, a whole step from E to F sharp, a half step from F sharp to G, whole step from G to A, whole step from A to B, whole step from B to C sharp, and half step from C sharp to D.

So D major needs those two sharps in order to keep that pattern of half steps and whole steps that makes it sound major.

So D major has F sharp and C sharp. Now, minor has the same kind of pattern of five whole steps and two half steps, but they occur in a slightly different order. Minor. Here's a D minor scale. D minor has one flat. It has a B flat. So it has a whole step between D and E, a half step between E and F. Then a whole step from F to G, whole step from G to a half step from A to B flat, whole step from B flat to C, whole step from C to D. So it's a minor scale.

It's got the same note names in the same order, right? D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D. But the accidentals are different, and it changes the color. Now, that's the pattern for a minor scale. And that pattern is where we get our key signatures. If you looked at a piece in D minor, it would have a key signature of one flat, that B flat that we just talked about.

But minor doesn't just stay right there. And this is the way I like to talk about the minor scales. If you know anything about minor at all or you've tried to study those scales, you know that you know a major key and a major scale, you got one key, one scale. But minor, you've got one key, and then you've got three different scales. There's the natural minor scale, which is the scale that follows the key signature. Hence the word natural, right? It's just exactly what the key signature says.

But Minor as a compositional sort of scale.

Left a couple of things to be desired. So through the history of music, composers experimented with minor to try to give it some of the power of major. I think one of the color traits of minor is that it's gentle, it's fluid, it's not very incisive, the way major can be. And apparently I'm not alone in thinking that, because the composers throughout history thought, you know, gosh, all right, D minor sounds wonderful.

But wouldn't it be nice if we had a more convincing sort of sound to it? Something like.

But in order to do that, you have to add an accidental. So composers raised the seventh note of the scale. So in our case of D minor, they made a C natural from the key signature into a C sharp. So now we have a very interesting scale. It's got a B flat from the key signature, but we're going to add an accidental to it. We're going to add the C sharp, and it sounds like this.

Now, composers considered this a fine alteration because it helped fix the harmonic sound of the key. So it helped bring more power to the harmony. And so it's called the harmonic minor scale. But there's a problem with that scale. Composers didn't like, and this is something that, you know, changed throughout history. They didn't like this extremely exotic sounding.

Interval that happened between the B flat and the C sharp.

Sounds kind of exotic, and, you know, I kind of like it. But it was not done. It was not done in some of the earlier centuries. It's an augmented second and was not considered a really desirable melody. So.

They wanted to get rid of that so they didn't have to use it in the melody. So they thought, well, we could get rid of that B flat, turn it into a B natural, and then we don't have that augmented second anymore. We've fixed the melody.

Ha. They liked that scale, and it was called the melodic minor scale. It adjusted the melody. And that particular scale has kind of an interesting function because that's what it's like on the way up. But on the way down, it reverts back to the key signature.

So it's different on the way down than the way up. And I think as soon as you start talking about that in terms of minor keys and scales, everybody's eyes start to glaze over. And I hope your ears haven't glazed over, because I'm going to tell you how to ignore that. Now that you know it, now that you know the reason for those.

Interesting accidentals that don't go along with the key signature. I want to talk a little bit more about how to relate minor to major. And I want to give you a system that will help you sort of make sense of that without having to go through that whole trauma of harmonic minor and melodic minor. Alright, so here we go.

Let's go back to our friendly D major scale.

Now, what if we just lowered the third note of that scale so that instead of having it be an F sharp, suppose we made it an F natural.

We now have the same four notes, the same first four notes anyway, as the minor scale.

And in fact, if you continue that scale without doing anything else to it.

We have the first four notes that sound like minor, the last four notes that sound like major. And what do you know, that's the same as the melodic minor scale. It's a mixture of minor and major, the best elements of both. That little minor third here that lets you know it's minor, and those last four notes that have the power, the definitive quality of a major scale.

So to get from major to minor, there's major. The first thing you have to do is lower the third.

Then to get back to the key signature, you need to lower the sixth and the seventh notes as well.

And that gets you back to the minor key signature with the very same tonic, the very same keynote. So I call this the 3, 6 and 7 method. It's a little bit of a shorthand. Now, I know many people have shortcut methods for figuring out minor keys. Like, okay, the minor key has the same key signature as the major key that's three notes higher. Or if you know the major key signature, then you can find out the minor because it's the sixth note in the scale. Or you go down three or you go up six. And all of those can be, you know, they work. Music is full of patterns and our western music system has them all over the place, which is great. And you can pick the pattern that you like, the one that seems to, you know, that you can latch onto the best. But what I like about thinking about the 3, 6 and 7 is that from any major key.

To go to minor, you lower everything. You lower the third.

You lower the sixth, you lower the seventh, and there's your minor key.

To go from minor to major, you raise the third, the sixth and the seventh, you raise the third and you raise the sixth and the seventh. And you can come up with your key signatures that way. The 3, 6, 7 method. Major is up, minor is down. So it's actually a very nice Shortcut for going between two keys with the same tonic. Those, by the way, are called parallel keys because they move through the same letter names, right? D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D.

Just with different accidentals. So they're called parallel keys. They are extremely closely related, right? It's just three notes difference. And in fact, it's likely only one note difference, that third, whether it's raised or lowered between that and those altered forms of the minor scale, the harmonic form and the melodic form.

So they're very close. Now. This is actually one of the reasons that I love minor keys, because once I understood why those accidentals were there, right? If you look at any piece in minor, probably you're going to see those raised sixes and raised seven. And why are they there? They're elements of harmonic or melodic minor. That's why they're there. And once I knew that, that helped me understand what was going on on the page. It helped me read the music faster because it allowed me to predict what accidentals I was going to need. A piece in A minor, for instance. Let's see, what are six and seven in A minor? F, F sharp and G or G sharp. So F and G, they're going to be the accidentals that I need. So I'm going to be pushing a lot of F and G levers or pedals in A minor. So it helped me make predictions about the accidentals I was going to need. And those accidentals made sense to me. They were no longer just random choices. It was because they were part of those other forms of minor and the way minor relates to major, they weren't random anymore. So it made it easier to memorize my music because they made sense so I could read it faster, learn it faster, and memorize it faster. There is a triple win.

I also find that listening to that difference between the parallel major and the parallel minor scales helps develop your skill of critical listening. I also find that listening to that subtle difference between major and minor scales, especially parallel scales, helps develop your critical listening skills.

This is ear training at its most creative. Think about this for a second. You want to listen to the color change. We've talked about the color change in the scale from major to minor. And the same thing happens in the chords. A major chord, a minor chord. Listen to that color change, particularly that difference with the third scale degree, right? And listening to that and learning to recognize it is the first big step in training your ear. So try thinking about minor, not as separate from major or as additional to major, but a different Color and related to major, the same kind of thing, but just a little different. Now, you can make those observations with your own music, too, not just with scales, right? You can ask yourself questions like this. What? In listening to a piece of music, what is the first moment? When is that first moment that I can hear that the piece is either in major or minor? Sometimes it's right from the very first note.

Going back to my friend the Pachel bell. Sometimes you know right from the beginning, but sometimes it's not quite so obvious. When do you hear it and why? When can you tell if it's major or minor? Is there a moment that comes in the middle of the piece where you're not quite sure?

What are the colors of minor as opposed to major?

This is extremely creative listening, and it's much more interesting than trying to train your ear by just singing a major third and a minor third, although that's always useful. But listening to that color change and learning to identify it is also essential.

And learning to hear that subtle color shift is a major step forward in educating your ear and becoming a skilled listener. It will help you in your improvisation. It will help you in your memorization and your sight reading. Learning to hear, not just to see the music on the page, but to hear what it sounds like, extremely helpful. Now, to be practical.

It'S helpful to know your minor key signatures.

But you don't have to learn all 15 of them. Why? Well, because we harpists don't usually play in all of them. Partly because the scales themselves get complicated with those accidentals and. And partly because if you're playing a lever harp, you just don't have all those accidentals to work with. So let's think for just a moment about a lever harp tuned in E flat.

Now, you can theoretically play any minor key in as many as three flats or as many as four sharps, just the same way you could for major. And that would give you, what, eight minor keys. But a few of those are going to be difficult. For this reason, if your harp is tuned in E flat major. Let's look at what happens with those minor keys. The first minor key you'd get to is with three flats. That would be C minor.

The three flats work all right, but remember the six and seven rule. We're going to have to add the sixth and seventh accidental. So we raise the A natural and the B natural. So we now have C, D, E flat, F, G. A natural, B natural, C. Okay, that works good. We'll move on to the minor key with two flats, I.e. g minor and it would be G, A, B flat, C, D, E flat, F, G. But remember, we may need to raise 6 and 7. So we'll raise the E flat to E natural, the F natural to F sharp.

All right. G minor works and so does D minor. We already discussed that with one flat, A minor, which has no flats or sharps.

E minor, which has just one sharp. It's got an F sharp, E, F sharp, G, A, B, C, D, E. Ooh, nice.

And remember, we may need to raise the sixth and seventh. So we'll need, let's see, the sixth note is a C, we'll need a C sharp, seventh note is a D. We'll need a D sharp. So.

But the next key in the sequence would have two sharps, that would be B minor and that's going to, or could likely require us to have a raised six scale, a sixth note which is a G sharp, not a big deal. But then a raised seventh note would be an A sharp. And if your lever harp is tuned in three flats, you don't have A sharps at the flick of a lever, do you? You'd have to retune. So that's why I say that five keys are going to be the essential minor keys for most harpists, particularly for lever harpists. And if your harp is tuned in E flat, those five keys are going to be C minor, G minor, D minor, A minor and E minor. Now if your lever harp is tuned in C, those keys will be. Let's go back here. A minor, E minor, B minor, F sharp minor and C sharp minor. They're less likely keys, but still you'll run into them. Now, pedal harpists can play in most of those keys, but still not all of them, because there are some keys that will require double sharps. And double sharps are not something we play easily. So some of those keys like G sharp minor, just will not show up. A flat minor, on the other hand, is a key that pedal harpists do see pretty frequently. Those flat keys take advantage of the the pedal harps sonority because in A flat all the strings are open strings. So it's a key that many harpist composers have written in. Not many people other than harpists like to play in A flat minor, but it works for the pedal harpists in the world, so they have a slightly larger key vocabulary. But if you stick to those five keys.

Those are going to be the ones that you will see most often. And it pays to remember those key signatures because it'll make Your life easier.

Enough of the practical, because I think what I love most about minor keys is how fluid they are. We've talked about how easy it is to make that color shift from minor to major and then back again.

But the ambiguity of minor in the way that it sounds, it's very sort of indecisive, gentle quality.

Lends itself to that fluidity between major and minor. And it's what makes improvisation in minor very interesting. Because you can weave in and out of those keys, those major modes and minor modes, so easily. One moment the piece feels very decidedly minor, and then the next it's moved its way into major and you can move it gradually back again without really making very much, if any, changes to accidentals. You might want to add a little bit more definitive kind of chords by putting some of those accidentals in. But you really don't have to. Let me play an example for you. This is a little. Oh, just a little warm up pattern. It's in E minor.

Just eight bars, little simple pattern, very definitely in E minor. But it could move so easily to C to G major. Listen.

Now, E minor moves very easily to G major because they are relative keys, they share the same key signature. So it moves very simply to major without any accidental shift there at all. But the E minor could very easily move to either E major without much alteration either. We'll start in E minor.

Not changing anything yet.

Now, this will sound a little bit abrupt, but.

Easily moves to E major with one simple G sharp added. So those kinds of changes happen so easily in minor.

The different modes, different colors just sort of weave in and out. And it makes any sort of improvisation you do very interesting because you can play with all of that. So if improvisation is something that you want to try, start in minor and see what happens. If it's something you do a lot of explaining, experiment with a minor key and see where you can go from there. Can you go to its parallel major? Can you go to its relative major? Right. Can you get back again after you've done that? And how simple and fluid can you make those changes? How uncomplicated can you make it? So just so much fun to play with. Now let me give you some specific tips for trying to learn more about those color changes. Now I've given you my simple system, the 3, 6 and 7 system for moving in between parallel major and minor keys, keys with the same tonic. I've given you those five essential minor keys that you should know. And we've talked a lot about the color of these Keys and how this can help inform your ear and help you understand.

The theory aspect of what you see on the printed page. But let me help you sort of take away some action steps, some things that you can do to start listening more critically and understanding just a little bit more about the music that you play. So here are a couple little things you can do. Look through your music, maybe something you're playing right now. Choose a piece that's in major.

And then think about what accidentals you would need to make, what changes you would need to make to have that piece be in the parallel minor. Try playing it in minor and see. Would you need to add some of those accidentals back, those sixes and sevens? Let me show you what I mean. Here's a very simple little.

Mozart sonata.

It's very definitely in C major. Well, what if it were in C minor? Well, let's see. I'd need an E flat and then 6 and 7. I'd need an A flat and a B flat. And there's Mozart in minor.

Interesting.

Now what accidentals would I want to add? Do I like the way it sounds?

I'm not convinced about that note. What if I added the B naturals back those sevens, right?

Oh, I like it.

I like it with the B naturals. Now what if I added the sixes back the A naturals? What would that sound like?

Well, that sounds a little abrupt to me, that A natural. Oh, I kind of like the A flats better. So I've just made some decisions and I've changed that little piece around and made my major piece minor. How much fun is that to play with just for a momentary experiment? Now you can do the same with a piece in minor. Choose that piece in minor. And what would it sound like if it were in major? What would it sound like if the accidentals in the piece that might already be there to adjust those sixes and sevens. What would it sound like if those accidentals weren't there? Thinking about, let's see, a piece like Green Sleeves.

Okay, now that had some C sharps in it. I'm playing it in D minor. Now what if those.

Ah, I wouldn't have to play it with the C nat with the C sharps. I could play it with the C naturals and get a slightly different sound, much more minor. Y. Huh? What would happen if I added in the B naturals.

Like the raised 6 scale degree and the raised 7th scale degree. So here's the raised 6B natural. Oh, I need a C natural there. A C sharp there? Would sound kind of awkward, but I'll use my C natural there.

Oh, that B natural doesn't sound very good. I'd need my B flat here.

And then, but I could use my C sharps here. So you can see there are ways to play with those accidentals that will give you some ideas of things you can play with and help your ear learn what kinds of changes you're hearing in your music. Help your lever or pedal changes make more sense to you. So a couple quick experiments like that can really help inform your ear and your mind about what is going on in your music. Help you learn how to distinguish major and minor, how they're the same and how they're different. Learning all about color, tone, color. Kind of fun, isn't it? I hope you have fun with those little exercises. They're more beneficial than you might think if you've never tried them. So I urge you to give it a shot. I promised you I would remind you that my free masterclass is tonight. This is Fumbles from Fumbles to Fabulous how to build the technique you want in 10 minutes a day. So that is a free masterclass happening tonight and if you haven't registered, you can just jump to the link in the show notes and get in there right away. Also, this week is the last week that my Build Extend Advance Technique course will be available at the bargain price of $25. That price goes up next week, and if you join that course now, not only will you get in for just $25, but you gets access to a couple of extra bonuses too. So you will find the link to do that in the show notes to get into the Build Extend Advanced Technique Challenge course. And we've been getting some wonderful comments from the students that have been going through it, and I think if you have been looking to ratchet up your technique, this is the way to do it. Or maybe just to fill holes in the in your technique and learn what you've been missing. This is a great way to do that. So. So the links to those things are in the show notes. I hope to see you on the masterclass and in the course. Now. Next week on the podcast, I will have a special episode in honor of Independence Day, and I'm going to be sharing a particular piece of music that was very important during the time of the American Revolution. It's not a heart piece, but I have created an arrangement that I will be more than happy to share with you. What I love about this piece, though, is that the history behind it is so fascinating and I'm really excited to be able to share that information with you too. So don't miss next week's episode when we get all American. So I will be talking to you then. Thanks so much for joining me today. I look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your Harp happiness every day. See you next time.