A Flat Miner

No, that's not a typo, silly. It's what you get when you drop a piano into a quarry.

I do love minors (not miners, mind you). The most beautiful Christmas carols, to me, are the ones with lots of minor chords.

It amazes me that a one-note change to a chord results in such a significant change in feeling. Only a few years ago, I learned how to find a minor chord on the piano. Find the regular chord, and move the middle note down just one key.

Voila! Beautiful, haunting melodies like "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," and "What Child Is This?"

Put that note back up where it was, and we're back in the majors, with uplifting songs like "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" and "Joy to the World" and "O Come, All Ye Faithful."

But it's the minors that have my heart - "We Three Kings" and "Do You Hear What I Hear" and "I Wonder As I Wander." Is it the melancholy in me? I don't know. What do you prefer?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Music is such a mystery to me. I took piano lessons as an adult for six months and it was like learning a foreign language. I didn't catch on very quickly and gave up. I wouldn't know a major from a minor!

Timber said...

What I love, now that I'm an adult, about learning some of these music mysteries, is that they're kind of mathematic when you break them down, and I never knew that. There's a beautiful order to it all! And all you need to know about majors and minors is that the majors sound happy, and the minors sound sad, or haunting - put in a most simplified way, of course!

Brenda Covert said...

I took 2 years of piano and more of clarinet, plus choir. So I do remember the difference between major and minor keys! I like the Christmas songs in minor keys as well. "Mary Did You Know" - that's minor as well, right?

Timber said...

Yup! That's a good example.