Rethinking Tonality
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- Опубліковано 13 тра 2021
- Or why I don't like the idea of "tonal ambiguity".
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For a long time, I've felt that the way we talk about keys is maybe a bit... outdated? Like, clearly keys matter, but there seems to be this disconnect between the formalized way we think about them and the way musicians actually use them. Over the years I've become increasingly convinced that keys don't matter nearly as much as we seem to think they do, and in this video I'd like to talk a bit about why.
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Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold for proofreading the script to make sure this all makes sense hopefully!
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Some additional thoughts/corrections:
1) It occurs to me that one could hear the section on the blues as me saying you shouldn't say a song is "in A blues" or whatever, but to be clear, that wasn't my point. Songs that use blues tonality can absolutely be described as using blues tonality. My point is that describing it that way is not functionally equivalent to placing it in a key. Just want to clarify that 'cause I'm not sure I was clear enough in the script.
2) Technically the solo from Sweet Home Alabama isn't strictly G major pentatonic. (Which is why I said mostly.) There's some Bbs running around in there too, and maybe some other notes I missed as well, I didn't transcribe it that closely. Didn't seem worth the digression in the script but I wanted to put it here in case anyone cares.
3) For another example where understanding the local tonal hierarchy is more important for soloing than identifying the global key, consider Coltrane's Giant Steps. The entire idea is that you're cycling through three different keys at a rate of 1-2 bars each at an extremely fast tempo, so you have to be constantly changing your melodic vocabulary in order to keep up. Declaring one of them to be the "real" key is fundamentally useless when you're trying to decide which notes to play when.
Hello
Hello
Hola
Bro.... trim your mast ass nails
Nasty*
6:32 "...including it anyway for completeness" - draws golden flying strawberry.
I felt that.
I'm glad it wasn't just me
Perhaps the three of us could go to group therapy sometime
still easier than even regular farewell
when 12 tone starts wondering about something we’re in for a treat
Yeah I didn't think he wondered things, I thought he just KNEW
Lol ye
@@FPSBuzzright lol
289 8
shoutouts to all the metal and post-hardcore music with IV-V-vi-vi chord loops that resolve to IV at the end of the song and make you go "wait no i don't understand"
Can you list a few songs or a song which has this kinda progression?
Wouldn't that more likely be a I - I - II - iii progression resting on the I? Or would the melody make that unlikely?
@@TheBoglodite (going to misuse mode names as tonal centers because it makes talking about this slightly easier)
if you mean "I - II - iii - iii" then yeah, that analysis makes perfect sense too, but I try to analyze four-chord-loop music in ionian, because it makes it less confusing when the chord loop changes to something very different in the same scale (and modal ambiguity is so common)
melody-wise, it's common for these songs to basically be written in aeolian, yeah; so analyzing it in lydian can make what the melody's doing more confusing
@@ryan.carneiro sorry for responding five whole months later, but here's a couple:
Thunder Girl (Draw the Emotional)
Redeemer (Takamachi Walk)
Andrew's Song (I The Mighty) (technically this hesitates the V and has a bunch of I-s inserted randomly but w/e)
I loved how "the single most important note, THE ONE AGAINST WHICH ALL OTHER NOTES ARE GONNA BE COMPARED" doodle was non other than SHREK.
Personally, I've noticed I barely think of key when playing or composing. I tend to think of the individual chords and their relations more than a key.
Usually when I need to share it with someone I need to go through the struggle of figuring out the "key I was playing in"
That’s my method of songwriting. I start off with a key and then borrow chords from other modes and scales.
What matters most for me is the melody line. Then, two-part counterpoint gives me a good, sound foundation. Anything else is interchangable.
2 words: Allan Holdsworth! :) He never even told his bass players what notes to harmonises his chords with.
I started writing songs with no idea what I was doing. I just wrote what I like to hear. I couldn't tell you what the key any of them are in. Sometimes it does resolve on it's own. But, all I know is once the lyrics finally figure out the melody, tempo, style, etc then the rest figures itself out. Course I'm a basic 5 chord guitar player.
The worst is when a song really wants Bm. It seems to be the worst chord possible to turn into a song. I'm trying to figure out out how others get it to work. I like that chord, but it seems the red headed step child that just wants to be loved.
Ultimately, I think that you all are over analyzing music. Just relax and enjoy!
@@LisaKnobel do you mean you find Bm a difficult chord to use in compositions? In the few years so far I’ve spent writing songs I’ve used it a few times but I never set out to do that, it just worked out that way. A couple of mine use Bm as a starting position - I’m still very fuzzy on keys but I think one of them is in E minor (or possibly G major) if you’re looking for ways to use Bm.
My all-important official opinion on Sweet Home Alabama:
When I first heard it, I thought it was in the key of D. I was an untrained power-chord playing rock musician, and the song started on D, therefore it was in D.
After I got trained in "classical western common practice harmony", I learned to hear it in G, because five four one and tonic resolution and all that fun stuff.
Neither way was wrong, and the context matters! For me, the context was interacting with it at different stages of my learning. Same person, new lens to see it through, and at the end of the day though...who cares. :)
And your first viewpoint was probably closest to the mindset under which it was written. Bunch of self/community-taught dudes hanging out in a garage, jamming. I suppose, though, that it does matter if only in the context of some highly trained and formal musician sitting in with you on the song who has never before been exposed to that song. Being able to identify the key will enable somebody like that, with no garage experience, to play along. But then... who in the world hasn't heard that song?! ;)
Actually, the second way is objectively wrong. Not because it's objectively wrong to say it's in G, but because "classical western common practice harmony" has absolutely nothing to do with Lynyrd Skynyrd, their genre, their era and their cultural background. Analysing rock like it's Mozart is fundamentally wrong (and racist)
The song is more than just chords and the melody is clearly, unquestionably in D.
I think what matters is what you hear. I hear D throughout the song and even when it lands on G for what is like 1% of the song, my ear expects to hear a D to resolve it (IV-I)
@@riccardostopazzola7931 I agree that the euro-classical lens is not really the optimal tool for analyzing Sweet Home Alabama, nor is it optimal for a lot of music. But I think it's an over-reach to say that trying to do so is racist. It's no more racist than a blues player, or an Indian classical musician, trying to understand and analyze euro-classical music through the lens of their own musical tradition. We all grow up in a culture, and we are all going to look at the world through that cultural perspective. Ideally we learn to question that perspective, and try to be open to other perspectives. But the reality of having a perspective is not what makes something racist.
The racism comes in when we say: "this doesn't conform to my cultural perspective, therefore it must be inferior." Unfortunately, that sort of bias does seem to be too common among folks who are invested in euro-classical traditions. But again, simply using that lens to look at and understand other things (however unsuccessfully) is not racist. It's when we jump from that perspective to ranking other cultures in relationship to our own that we become racist. You can have one without the other!
6:31 did you just put a Celeste reference in a music theory video
I love this channel so much
“You don’t want to just smash out notes and hope it works.” But.... isn’t that just ✨spicy jazz✨?
*Free Jazz
well even the crazy free jazz from the 60s and 70s wasn't completely random - there is always an idea everything evolves around
oh boy, this was meant to be a meme, not an actual educated take on music theory haha.
@@singerofsongs468 why not both? =)
Spicy jazz smashes out notes and makes it work
I think this is all very astute. There are plenty of examples of musicians who don’t think of keys at all when they write their music, which often times leads their music to avoid description by a traditional key approach. Allan Holdsworth for example exclusively thought in amorphous pitch collections, both for chordal writing and theory
That man wrote some great great music. Hard to analyse but to my ears it makes sense.
Similar to the way Zappa constructed improvisational ideas too
@ Hard to analyse according to concepts of functional harmony, certainly. Holdsworth took the basic notion of modal jazz harmony (with Coltrane the obvious point of departure) and by generating harmony and melody from artificial scales he created extraordinary sound structures that have their own internal logic.
Allan remains one of my heroes. Apparently he never told his bass players what notes to use either. He focused primarily on voice-leading, so that's a reason why his harmonies seem so logical (once the shock of hearing them for the first time has worn off!).
Very true - there are a lot of musicians out there who wouldn’t be able to tell you what key their songs are in. They weren’t classically trained, so how would they know? And if they don’t know, how important is it actually?
Thumbnail game crazy. I see what you did there.
I was wondering when I’d see a thumbnail comment
As someone not classically trained, keys are getting to be understandable but are also maddening. It’s not just the complete lack of help those who are trained in music offer (I’ve had such gems as ‘it’s easy’ and ‘just find the key’ when asking something as simple as how you find the key of a song), it can also be frustrating to even work out in the types of music I like, such as grunge/alternative.
For me it's the beauty of music, it's an artform. So how you create something is your choice. I am rather a analytical composer, but you can also follow your emotions. Actually there aren't really any rules, the tools are there , but you don't have to use them.
This is great.
My attempt at defining "musical key:" a frame of reference for communicating and thinking about musical harmony and melody, comprised of a named base or home pitch and a named or implied set of relationships to other pitches relative to the base pitch.
This is such an amazing video and I love your art and your voice they work perfect together. Keep up the great work! I can't wait to see more of your ideas
So I've started thinking about instrument specific keys. Specifically guitar. Since tons of rock songs don't really care much about being in key, instead they care about what sounds good from the various open chords, you can start thinking of it like this. So when you see D-guitar, you know the root is on D, most of what you are playing is going to be open chords that sound good with D, you will probably see C major and B minor, but don't be shocked if there's an F major or an A major kicking around.
It can be useful in theory when you see those chords and you realize that the writer probably didn't care to much about theory and you can start with how they wrote it.
I really like your system and I may be stealing it for my own purposes. :)
I think you're hitting the nail on the head with how you're interacting with music - something you made up that makes perfect sense to you based on your own experience and context...and it also just happens to be similar to mine!
@@seth_piano Thanks. I'm glad it's worth stealing. Here's another thing that fits. I don't notice people adding open strings to major or minor chords very often. A good example is A major. If you play it as a barre you get one chord, but if you remove the barre and play the open string you get an add9. You do it to a C chord you get Cmaj7. Since B and E are almost never sharp, any time your playing on the right hand of the circle of fifths, they will always be in key. The Alex Lifeson chord does that, but the concept doesn't seem to get used much.
Yes. It makes sense to notice if you are looking at music that was written by someone who either was themselves, or was influenced by, songwriters who composed with a guitar in their hands and limited ability to play it. So they will take the few chords they find easy to play and make a song using them. If that doesn't work, they may try different guitar tunings. Sometimes even retune a string or two and then play as if they were still in standard tuning. Once people get used to hearing that, it functions just like any other kind of tonality.
A good example of a song that makes a LOT more sense if you use this is Projected Twin's Redemption Away. The song pretty clearly was built around the note F#, but what it uses as the I chord is... What's this? F#7add4? Why? And one might then launch into a weird analysis about how F# is not actually the key, because a perfect 4 is just too weird to use on your I chord, and a composer would _surely only do that to create tension_ or something...
Unless you realize that this was written on guitar, and B and E are just the two bottom open strings.
That's a good insight that explains a lot of guitar-based popular music. It reminds me of something a theory prof of mine mentioned in a class on Renaissance polyphony. He claimed that the whole concept of a "suspension" in Western common-practice music (a held-over note from a previous chord that becomes dissonant when the harmony under it changes, until it resolves downward to a chord tone) was most relevant to vocal music, and that for a guitar, the most natural way to reduce tension is to hammer on a fret which means that suspensions tend to resolve upward. I'm not sure I fully agree with that, but it is a completely valid point that the perception of directionality or function is not abstract, but tied very much to the instrument or voice and how it functions.
I literally just came here from my weekly voice lesson where my teacher and I were having a discussion on this. She has me grab a random folk song from a book and we work on sight singing it, and today the one I picked seemed to modulate between F major and D major, and we spent the whole sight singing part of the lesson trying to figure out which solfege syllables to assign to which parts. It was fun
Can you tell us which song that is? That's an odd pair of tonal centers to oscillate between!
@@zkassai.audio.2 It's a song called "The Homestead Strike" collected in Wisconsin by Helene Stratman-Thomas in the 1940s. I've never actually heard it before, I picked it from a book titled "Folk Songs Out of Wisconsin" (Harry B Peters, editor, published State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1977)
There is a version recorded by Pete Seeger, but it seems to have a different melody
Fixed Do sucks. Movable Do for life!
@@tiyenin She's used both with me, depending on what we're working on, but mostly movable. In this case it messes with my head a bit singing the same pitch as both La and Do, depending on which bar in the song, but it's the fun kind of confusing
Arguing about keys is indeed boring. Yet still interesting enough to argue about. I like the blues approach of not worrying too much much about tonality but instead focusing on what sounds good. Cause after all music is music and it's not about the specific albeit useful details that help us understand a song, It's about the song itself and if it's rockin.
It can be fun to debate but the answer doesn't really fucking matter lmao
Thank you for this interesting video, 12tone. Tonality and harmonic ambiguity are one of my all time favourite concepts and that's what was the theme of my Master's thesis. Since then I have actively been rethinking the whole harmonic system and trying to create a model I call "local functions" where keys (in the traditional sense) are pretty much thrown in the bin. The point of this model is to focus on adjacent chords and their relationship. Say, in a bVI-bVII-I progression it's more interesting to analyze bVI in relation to bVII (as a weak "major 2nd dominant") as to I. In fact, the same applies to ol' good IV-V-I where I don't see IV as a subdominant but a weak dominant to V. This model is still on progress and I'd be happy to publish a book or make a video series about it later.
When I was analyzing through every #1 song in the Billboard singles list I found myself in a trouble when trying to decide the key for many of the songs; especially post 2000s. In fact, I labeled some possible keys on them instead of just one definitive key. Modern pop songs really play on Ionian/Aeolian harmony in such a way that either of the tonic chords of these modes aren't established so strongly that one could decide the key without question. For exaomple the cliche progression Am-F-C-G can easily achieve this. I'd be tempted to continue work in the university and conduct research on humans in the cross-field of perceptual psychology and musicology. The tests should contain music excerpts utilizing different harmonic vocabularies so that the human subjects can decide which tones seem fitting and what tone feels tonic the most. So, it would be a lot like what Krumhansl did back in the days.
I think that music theorists tend to neglect the actual listener's psychology when analyzing tonality and instead they rely on established theoretical models, which limits the analysis and musical thinking in a broad sense. Tonality is all about what the listener expects to hear both in relation to what he/she has already heard in the piece and what kind of music he/she has heard through his/her life. This creates intuitive tonal hierarchies in the listener's mind, which have an important job making sense out of the music. At least in the Western world, Ionian dominates everywhere so strongly that it has to have impact on just about everyone's musical cognition more or less. Zooming into the next layer, the listener might be a dedicated rock musician so that Mixolydian might be represtented as the default mode; at least in rock... and so on. It would be an enormous task to try and map out something like this of course.
Good job, it's always a pleasure to watch your videos.
-Teemu
Excellent commentary. Most of these song analysis efforts have one main goal, which is to find patterns in the music which can then be used to simplify the understanding of the song and why it works. This insight can then be used to analyze other songs, compare styles, techniques and so forth. Is it limiting? Absolutely. Should we abandon this type of approach? No. This is not the end of the road, folks. No matter what set of musical definitions or concepts you set up, whether it is key, tonality, harmony, etc. someone is always going to come along and smash it, defy it, nullify it, and that's as it should be. Beethoven came along and smashed the compositional rules that his predecessors used, to massive success, and the tradition continues today. Melody itself is under heavy attack in recent times, and while I personally am quite attached to it, I realize that's because that type of music has great associations for me. The one thing that I believe transcends all of the theory and analysis is the ability of the mind to recognize skill, purpose and soul at work - the sense that there is a message in the music, and that resonates within ourselves. The greatest composers and musicians are those who communicate the most clearly, vividly and authentically. There are some common methods that the greats use, so you will find some useful "rules" that have persisted for generations. For those who do not have the internalized command of the structures of music where it flows out of them like water, we must bridge the gap by describing music using the tools and definitions that others create for us. Those tools can be limiting, but they are just that - tools, and they have their place.
This reminds me of a Debussy quote - "Works of art make rules. Rules do not make works of art."
The "rules" and theoretical frameworks we use to understand and analyse music, such as key centres, really just come from a period of practice - composers tend to use pitches in 'these' ways with 'these' relationships between notes, and so therefore we can understand a theoretical basis that works for that music. However no composer should feel bound or limited by the 'rules' - because "if it sounds good, it is good!" And different periods and cultures of music have given us completely different theoretical bases for understanding that music, which don't always translate well between.
Fundamentally what even is music? It's just organised sound. The way that each musician and each composer organises the sounds they can make is ultimately up to them. The same as how I wouldn't walk into your kitchen and tell you how you should organise your cupboards just because I might organise my own house a certain way, I wouldn't say to a musician who's organised their sounds (in this case, pitches) in a certain way that they're wrong - on the proviso that it sounds good.
Equally, in reality - I'm a high school music teacher and in a position of trying to give my students a level of understanding that can birth and inform creativity. One of the most common pieces of advice I give to new composers is they need to pick a key centre and use it - because otherwise the piece lacks coherence and sounds like a disorganised mess. After all - "You have to know the rules to break them".
Side note - for another great example of tonal ambiguity where you wouldn't expect it, look up "Revelation Song". It's a religious/worship song, but the particular relationship between melody and chords leaves it open to interpretation - similar to Sweet Home Alabama in this way. If you choose to hear it in D (the opening chord), you can and it makes sense. If you choose to hear it in G (the more technically applicable key given the note choices), you can and it makes sense. You can try to hear it in both at the same time and it really messes with you.
I think tonality is something dynamic, changes along with the song, for me, this term describes the "direction or gravity" generated by the harmonic tension of the chords (and other factors like rhythm, dynamics, etc.), if we're frequently pointing them to a tone it appears the sensation of a center, the key of the song, but of course, we can play and lead them wherever we want. The key of a song, if exist, works as a storytelling resource, start at the beginning, finish at the end, or get lost somewhere between. I love this channel, excuse the bad English.
Love these videos and love that you’re left handed !!! As am I!!!! This video was amazing thank you so much for this 🙏🙏
Just a word of appreciation for the rapidity of 12tone's doodles. It's like one every seconds for 14 minutes here. When was the last time you did like, 800 doodles?
I’ve watched most of your videos since I subscribed, a couple months ago, I am barely understand anything you say. It’s still very entertaining don’t get me wrong but, “I like your funny words magic man”.
This problem honestly comes up even in classical music when you consider sonata form. Even if the title is "Sonata in G major" the development is purposefully ambiguous, the recap may be in D major and the second movement could be in something completely different like Em or Bm.
I think it's more helpful to think of key centers as a local point of resolution that may change throughout the piece from section to section or even from one phrase to the next.
??? Why do you say it as if it were a new idea? That's literally the way it's been always thought about. At least ever since the concept of tonality first arose (as a defined and clear entity) in the 19th century. A piece being 'in G major' does not mean its tonic will be G throughout the piece, it means, rather, that it will *eventually* return to G and thereby resolve the tension created via the ambiguous sections and distant modulations that may have occurred during the development of the piece. And in general modulations themselves are still subordinated to the overarching tonality of the piece: the first modulation generally goes to either the V or the III (depending on whether it's in major or minor, respectively).
@@pablom.5698 You're right, the composers themselves thought of it in this way. But many people studying classical music today are taught to think of things like key centers in a much more rigid manner than was the original intention; the same way that ornamentation and other aspects of music are lost over time and in translation
your use of the term "gravity" really helped me grasp this concept. Thank you!
I am a harmony nerd and I love harmonically ambiguous songs. I play for several churches and so much of CCM songs are harmonically ambiguous.
Ever tried playing modal harmony, you'd probably enjoy it
@@8BitsOfFun1323 All of my songwriting uses modal harmony. I play piano, organ, and synths but I like to write songs in modes that sound good on guitar. Been doing lots of stuff in Phrygian over the past three months or so.
@@Doug_Edwards99 I'm a big fan of Lydian and Dorian myself. Right now I'm writing a song that's a mix of modal and Bebop era jazz
@@8BitsOfFun1323 Dorian is my favorite mode. Makes a song feel minor and funky without feeling dark
@@Doug_Edwards99 totally agree
At the point where you drew shrek at ' everithing will be compered to that', I completely lost track of tonal hierarchy :D
this is my favorite video you've done
"This Is the Song That Never Ends" It goes on and on my friends. Some people starting singing it...
THAT! That's what happens when a song isn't centered on a definite key.
There is truth in these words
I’ve never seen a key go out the window quite like the first few notes of happy birthday
Great video though I like your way of thinking about keys it is more clarifying and also makes sense when u factor in modes. Like, modal progressions aren't exactly progressions, and certain sets of chords and compositions aren't exactly progressions either, or are not organized in just one key. And that clarifies how much context matters here.
Phil Tagg; Tonical Neighborhoods is another grest tool. I think you've mentioned him in a video before. I love his Everyday Tonality. Thank you for the great videos
"That thing that happens when you hear a song and you're not quite sure what key it's supposed to be in" aah yes, how I hear every song.
No but for real I have been playing guitar for a ridiculous amount of time and I still can't really get this level of ear training down :(
:(
You can try ear training exercises, I feel like I am getting there and can play quite a few things I hear, I've been playing guitar for a year. Apparently singing really helps, I want to try that too.
Just to make sure - you are not expecting yourself to 'hear' the key, are you? That would require perfect pitch. However, if you can figure out the melody and chords (quickly or slowly by trial and error - that's what I try to do when I am not being lazy, and it has helped train my poor ear to become a little better than it used to be, although I have a long way to go), then you should be able to make a reasonable guess about the key from that info.
Maybe most importantly, make yourself aware of tension. Play a chord loop, write down which chords feel more stable/resting and which ones seem to want to drive forward. Based on that, the chord that feels the most at rest is often the basis for the key.
To hear tension better, do specific interval training. Learn the 12 intervals and what they feel like. Once you have that down all the other stuff will be easier.
There is more to say if you want to hear it, but maybe I've just rambled on and misunderstood what you tried to say.
@Xander Johns I have often tended to get by without figuring out the key. I do want to be able to play melodies on top though, so for that I start by figuring out the vocal melody and use the notes from that; I also tend to just use trial and error with the pentatonic scale. If the song is more complex, I may opt to switch scales on any chord where the first pentatonic sounds bad. This is something I've started to do recently though, and I need more practice to get the transitions right.
Dont look for the key, my way of doing it is finding the I chord , what sounds like a I chord, be it major of minor, what sounds like a dominant chord, etc. Eventually you'll know what's the I chord and when you get to your instrument you can find it by ear and most likely the key of the song
When youve got some more ear training or experience you'll just relative pitch the songs you hear. I generally react to songs in E and go hey that song's in E, because I can remember what the open E from my guitar sounds like and compare it to the song im hearing.
This is all great to think about, and it’s nice to have somebody advocating for alternative thinking around analysis of songs that aren’t necessarily rooted in functional tonality. I do think that even many very ambiguous songs that never reveal their “key” are still using the toolset of that key, though there are others that are drawing on other ways of organizing the pitch collection, like modality or otherwise. The one thing I can’t wrap my head around and wonder if it’s evidence that people place different weights on things like metrical position, melody, and chord sequence when listening to a song and intuiting which notes feel tonic - do you really hear the third chord of Africa’s chorus as the most stable of that sequence? Personally, I can’t imagine the song ending on that chord - to me, it could only end on the F# that comes at the beginning of the sequence, and that signals to me that it’s definitely in F# (for me). It’s probably from a combination of factors like the chord’s position in the sequence, having enjoyed and written many songs that revolve around that chord sequence, having an affinity for modal writing, and having heard the chorus of Africa more often than the verses, but I think the argument is easy to make that the chorus modulates away from the key of the verse to F#m. But regardless of that argument, this makes me wonder whether two people truly can hear the song as rooted in a different key, or whether one can feel an undeniable pull to a certain tonic while another experiences more ambiguity and feels none.
🎵 sooo coool... 2 things... 1. kept thinking i'm watching this in playback speed 2x & went to adjust it back to normal several times lol... 2. one can watch this without sound & totally enjoy the cool hand drawings (a story onto themselves) or listening without video & get everything else... 🎖️ 🙂
Good video! You explained it very well. I find that it's a pleasant surprise when the notes are used in a way that is somewhat unexpected. On the lines of that scale being used for keys other than A major, the E Mixolydian example I thought of is "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve and for B Dorian I thought of "Get Lucky" by Daft Punk and "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons.
Have you heard about the studies on “Inflationary-Surprise Hypothesis"?
So interesting. I'd love to hear you analyze music made by amateurs, ppl who have no idea what a key is. See if they behave similarly
I feel like amateur musicians tend to learn one set of chords and use those over and over. Take amateur guitarists. They learn the key of G and bang you unlocked limitless guitar writing capabilities. 😉
@@quinreimer5906 Depends on the amateur. I'm an amateur, I got Ableton like 2-3 years ago and have been music almost daily ever since. I also got a bass guitar which I play often and never really got formal training. I'm only just now starting to learn and understand keys and modes. With that said, and as you can probably assume, most of my music sounds terrible. But it's fun to make anyways, and I'm sure there's other people like me out there, probably
@@jacobsnedaker8993 I would probably say seeing as you've been playing for so long that you're not an amateur
@@quinreimer5906 If anything, amateur describes people with more musical skills than I have
I appreciate the information density in this video.
Maye it's just me, but I feel this video has a slower pace compared to the usual ones. I like that.
kinda adding to your point and simplified,
a lot of us who have been playing for a long time and have a good relative pitch ear ,sometimes end up jamming with someone who might not always give you a key or possibly even tell you the wrong key by accident, so rather than finding a root not(especially in jazz which could be out side of the root if they're a modal player) we end up finding a tonal center around a melody even if its just a simple chord or arpeggio.
3:27 I thought you were gonna break into God Save The Queen : )
I love this video, I've always struggled with keys, great to know about this.
I know this channel focuses on theory, and I love it for that, thank you 12tone!
But, I'd like to posit the selection of a key from an engineering perspective:
If you consider than it is harder for speakers to produce low frequencies as opposed to high freqs. then you would think of where you'd like to place your bass/kick within that spectrum.
Since a single hertz can make a big difference in pitch in low frequencies, moving the kick or any foundation instrument up or down just a few semi-tones can drastically alter the speaker load and therefore the tone between bright/dark, muddy/clear.
It's a subtler change than one would get boosting/cutting lows/highs, or balancing low mids, but it seems to be a fine detail that is significant enough for top producers to consider.
For example, many pop songs are written in keys ranging from F to Ab, and if you look at the lower octaves of these keys you'll find that your lowest usable frequencies are 21-27hz.
and the octave frequencies of those keys sit in better positions for most playback system cutoff points. E.G. headphones and speaker tend to be advertised as having 20z-20k response but in reality the roll-off starts much higher, and in the cases of laptops (~200z [G]) and cell phones (~800z [Ab]) these keys but up right against those cutoffs.
Just something to consider.
Personally, this rings true even outside of the engineering perspective.
From the orchestration/arrangement perspective: Instruments themselves sound different throughout their playable range, and having your key sit on a particular part of an instrument's range can really change what your music sounds like.
And even from the composition perspective itself: after a certain point, the lower a chord's root is, the wider the interval has to be between the root and the next note up if you want to avoid muddiness. So you can choose _how much_ muddiness you want in your song by picking your key based on that!
Finally I found someone who is actually answering (or at least asking) the very questions that I've always had.
In the cheap "composing" or music writing app I have, you have to start every new song by first choosing a key. I'll often want to transcribe what I hear in my head, so I have to start in C major, sharpen or flatten as I find the tone and work out what the key actually is later.
Here's a question: how does someone whose been trained to analyze within a framework of keys reject that framework?
by growing up
Very interesting video. It made me think about Philip Tagg's "Everyday Tonality" where he argues that the kind of tonality used in pop is in reality a non-tonality, hence the general confusion in interpreting certain songs. He talks about chord loops as the structure of pop music and these work in a fundamentally different way from Western tonality which developed as a vertical reading of counterpoint. The fact that these loops revolve around a center makes them sound like tonality but one would argue that Beethoven's use of tonality (and voice leading) is very different from what we can see in pop music. I see it like a different system, a cyclical one, where the cycles sustain a often more refined taste for timbre and leave enough space for lyrics and their strophic construction.
Funny thing, before I started learning "formal" music theory to augment my hobby, I used to think most of the stuff in the context of chord tones providing "mini keys". I also considered chord progressions in terms of isolated relations between two chords rather than thinking of their functions in a specific key.
When I started to learn music theory, I thought that my approach had been completely idiosyncratic and incomplete. But when I started delving beyond the fundamental basics through Discord discussions and content creators like 12tone, I've started to realize that my approach was completely valid and that anything I learn from the "standard" music theory shouldn't automatically surpass or replace my earlier notions - rather, both of these perspectives offer different sides of the elephant and when I want to create a solution, I can try out both approaches and choose the one that I like the most.
For instance, my music used to be (and still is) mostly locked to natural minor tonality because I think the stability and lack of strong harmonic pull in that key helps creating these diffuse landscapes of tonality that I seem to intuitively prefer to clear-cut patterns of tension VS resolution. But in recent years, I've learned about stuff like functional harmony, voice leading and counterpoints - and I've used these things to make my chord progressions more cohesive and tie different parts of the progressions more naturally to each other. In one my newer songs, I've used borrowed chords from parallel major (/parallel harmonic minor, however you want to see it) in my V chord so that the progression back to the tonic neatly ties up the loop of chords.
perfect, glad i'm not the only one having trouble pinpointing the exact and unarguably correct key for a song or chord progression. so many different interpretations depending on how you look at it. atm for triad chords i just look at the objective movement of a chord (for example, going from F to C is a major to major chordal movement of 7 semitones upwards) rather than at what the root chord is and what key everything is in (is it a I-V movement in F major? or a IV-I movement in C major? perhaps a V-II movement in B locrian? xD). so yeah really glad to know i'm not just way off in the problems i'm seeing with keys. definitely agree that models are exactly that - models - and should be used as tools rather than viewed as divine law. afterall it's the theory that tries to describe the music, not the other way around! anyway thanks very much for the video!
I wonder if it would be useful to refer to collections of notes themselves when the key is ambiguous. For example, whether Sweet Home Alabama is in D Mixolydian or G Major, either way, it's still a key with One Sharp.
EDIT: I see before I mixed my modes and incorrectly referred to the song as having two sharps (F# and C#) when in reality it only has one (F#) and got my modes backwards, whoops. Thanks for the corrections!
Well I don't think Sweet Home Alabama ever uses that 2nd sharp. I believe the song must be in D and so yeah I guess on sheet music the signature would have 2 sharps. Blues music usually uses a flat 7th and that doesn't change the name of the key lol
A blues jam in D that uses C's and F's and Ab's is still in D.
It would use one sharp. The discussion is about G major vs D Mixolydian. Both are one-sharp scales.
@@MaggaraMarine You are right, I confused my modes whoops
Another interesting consideration is when the melody and the chordal accompaniment diverge from each other - a well-studied phenomenon in popular music (eg. Temperley, David. "The melodic-harmonic'divorce'in rock." Popular Music (2007): 323-342; Nobile, Drew F. "Counterpoint in Rock Music: Unpacking the “Melodic-Harmonic Divorce”." Music Theory Spectrum 37.2 (2015): 189-203; de Clercq, Trevor. "Some Reharmonization Techniques for Popular Music: Melodic Skeletons, the Melodic-Harmonic Divorce, and Meta-Schemas." Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy 6 (2018); Richards, Mark. "Tonal ambiguity in popular music’s axis progressions." Music Theory Online 23.3 (2017).)
Im so glad i found this channel
I’d love for you to do an analysis of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” (especially given its recent resurgence due to Tic Tok), because I think it also has an issue with determining the “key”.
The vocals very clearly are Aminor, mostly A minor pentatonic, but the chords are F and G. The F is like the “root” chord, it’s like an F Major 7 if you add the E note from the melody (I don’t know if any instrument plays an actual F Major 7 chord), and an F Major 7 *is* an A minor chord, just with an added note in the bass.
I think the solo section in the middle does finally play an Am chord, but that’s it and the song doesn’t end that way.
I don’t think the song could be analyzed as F Lydian because there’s such a pull to A in the melody, and literally no F’s.
I’m sure your analysis will have something to do with the lyrics and the title and the feeling of never actually feeling “home”.
I think a big part of why people might hear Dreams as A minor / C major is also because of the popular music context _outside of_ the song.
Holding a IV-V loop for some time before a resolution is a pretty common way to create suspension/anticipation in popular music, so someone immersed in that musical context is likely to hear a chord loop made of two major chords a major second apart as IV-V.
And that, to me, fits a song that uses the words "you'll know" as a refrain, because while that resemblance to IV-V makes the song feel like it's working towards something, there's very little instability in the chord loop itself, so the harmony sounds like it might be going somewhere but isn't in a rush to get there yet.
Also, I've just realized - she DOES sing an F in the main chorus melody... but as a passing note, and _over the G chord._
The male backing vocals do proper _hold_ an F in the chorus, but their role in the arrangement feels more harmonic than melodic to me.
I remember having a … discussion about the Londonderry Air, the tune behind the song Danny Boy. A lot of people say it is in D Major, but the tune resolves to F#. But it includes a G natural (b2), which makes it F# Phrygian? It’s either that, or you can stay in D Major and just live with letting it resolve to the III note.
I think something that has bothered me about wrighting in a key is this idea that as long as you stay in that key your music will sound good.
I always found that since I don't know enough about wrighting music as a whole my music just fell onto chaos or worse. I think it's because I have learned very fragmented parts of music and/or music theory without understanding how to use it. Like having a collection of encyclopedia that are missing nearly every other book if not more. I know a lot about a bunch of different parts of music but not enough to put it all together. One of the first songs I wrote. Is a really good example of this.
That's ok. The most important part is finding what works for you
I'm currently working on a song where the beat was showing up as b flat minor but it sounded too upbeat for minor so I sang in major c#/d flat major and I think its barely noticeable when heard in its own context
Fascinating! I think more in solfège and intervals than in keys, tbh.
Fixed-Do or Movable-Do?
@@pablohowardcello4925 Movable-Do 100%. Possibly the most useful thing I ever learned in choir (that and intervals).
@@emilyrln Absolutely 100% I agree so useful, but just curious then for you how is that different than thinking in terms of key?
@@pablohowardcello4925 It lets me think about each key in the same way with the same words and relationships. I don't have to think D, E#, F, G, A, B, C#, D when I want to sing in the key of D major; it's just Do Re Mi etc. The flat seventh interval isn't D-C, it's Do-Te. If the key changes, I just assign Do to a new note, and everything works the same as it used to. When I write music, I can use solfège the whole time and then decide what key I want it to be in later (and I don't have to think about all the different letters and flats and sharps that are unique to each key).
Basically, I'm lazy XD
@@emilyrln got it :) we mean the same thing-I was just thinking those functional relationships you described are already included in the idea of key, just like 12tone was describing, key is more than just the collection of pitches, but a hierarchical set of relationships and expectations, like Ti-Do, Fa-Mi, Sol-Do etc.
What key is this in?
42.
Whenever it comes to traditionally vague things, I always default to Schoenberg and/or Hindemith for ways of determining what tonic is, at any given time, and it usually falls in line with how I hear it.
The notion of tonicizing intervals and figures is pretty compelling, and I think it does stick. Like even if something sounds foreign to my ears, and I'm not really convinced that I'm hearing "Do", it does still have an overall structure to the sound like I'd expect in a tonal setting.
Also, props for writing continuity equations around 11:45. haha
Which modes can I use to improvise over it ? That’s the defining factor of the key signature, but does not mean I cannot use accidentals.
Mentions "profound impact", shows a doodle of an asteroid speeding toward a dinosaur.😂
Most of the time im thinking about developing the aesthetics, momentum and voice leading of a tune. And most of that is determined by the core ideas, overall arrangement and production choices.
The key isnt really effected by a lot of that stuff and is often misleading because of that.
Well I think tonality in minds of many people is totally got itself in a kinda strict explanation. So I can agree with ya 'bout such difficulties in songs about determing tonality or whatever, cuz music is much more than just one tonality of strictly major or minor. After all shall conclude that chords simply might change during song and may be in other mode such as maj or minor and also may be altered within that by many varieties (dorian, mixolydian and so on)
Question: does this not also have to do with what’s written on paper vs what’s heard? As a 95% by-ear musician, I find myself viewing notation as an approximation of the composer’s intent-things like swing, timefeel, and intonation are relatively subjective. Even tempo is described by metaphors. I would imagine that someone Classically trained might view a performance as an interpretation of the written work.
I suspect this is a question of medium: written and spoken language operate differently. In an era of audio recordings, we can pick one performance as definitive if we want to. In an era of written music, we rely on fidelity to the sheet. In a more oral society that values social learning over the study of unembodied records, the experience is different yet because we don’t have a source to return to in the same way.
I guess what I’m getting at is that when hearing is what you rely on for understanding instead of reading, the way you interpret the thing changes. Both are beneficial and having one without the other shrinks our ability to experience a given piece, but in an auditory medium with unembodied recordings, a form of interpretation designed for another medium falls short with little surprise.
What key is the alphabet in? It begins with A, but as any scrabble player with tell you, the most common letter is E, so perhaps the alphabet is in E?
Here's an idea to approaching pop music analysis - how about just not focusing on harmony at all? Instead of focusing on creating new theories that explain harmony better in pop (and don't get me wrong, these theories are great - but I feel like focusing on them is kind of missing the forest for the trees), how about just approaching it from a completely different perspective where harmony is not the focus? I mean, it's interesting to theorize about pop harmonies, but the fact that we are even focusing on harmony is because of the influence of classical theory. If music theory was written today, and the basis of it was modern pop music, how much would we actually talk about harmony, and how much would we focus on other elements?
I mean, I understand why historically speaking music theory is so focused on harmony. In common practice period music, harmony is basically the form of the piece. The composition is pretty much structured around harmony - it's very much "harmony driven" music. But in modern pop, this is not the case. If a song repeats 4 chords over and over again, I think that should suggest that maybe you aren't even supposed to focus on the harmony - it's just a background element. Focusing on harmony in a pop song analysis would be kind of comparable to only analyzing the beat of a rap song and totally ignoring the main part that is the rapping.
So, when approaching pop music analysis, maybe it's time to just stop talking about harmony, and start focusing on other elements that are more important to the style. I think our theories should reflect what's happening in the music. This video is correct on the fact that assuming that everything is in a key, and trying to understand everything through that lens can be a bit problematic, and may limit our understanding of the piece, because we are just trying to apply analytical models that don't really apply to it. But I would take it a step further and say that assuming that harmony is important is also limiting, and may make you focus on a thing that isn't that important, and ignore things that actually matter a lot more.
Maybe this is a bit too radical. I don't think harmony should be totally disregarded. But the role we give harmony in our musical analysis of modern pop songs is way too big, and it's an idea that comes from classical music analysis where harmony actually explains a lot about the piece. But pop is quite different - it isn't a harmony-driven style. So, maybe we should approach pop music analysis from a completely different perspective, where harmony only plays a very small role (unless the piece is actually based on a more "classical approach")?
This has been addressed by some theorists (probably Phillip Tagg most notably) but hasn't taken off the way I'd like it to.
Most pop analysis outside of the "common practice" European tonal music framework is more musicology than theory; more about situating it culturally - which of course has tremendous value to analysis, but isn't the same thing (it's more along the lines of how folk music is discussed - which makes total sense to me, as I absolutely consider pop music to be folk music... but if we get into that we'll be here forever 😎) and leaves us awesome pop (all popular music styles, inc. rock, dance, hip-hop, etc., not just what's on top 40 radio) fans disrespected by those "art music" snobs. 😉
I would definitely like a pop theoretical practice to start to take hold; but the main discussion i see of it is... on UA-cam.
Wow, I'm early! Nice video. < 3
I have questions.
The body of the videos always show you drawing with the left hand- but the intro bumper you're drawing with the right hand?
Also, your commentaries AND the intro bumper both have, like, English language or music notation, so it's not a case of a mirrored recording.
?
It was the elephants on a magic carpet ride that got me.
A whole new woooooooooorld! (Loved it)
If the dominant chord structure in the blues can be satisfied with the dominant 7 chord’s diminished sub
Ex: G7b9 is Fdim
Then the blues is a fully chromatic progression.
Take a blues in C
C7b9 - Edim
F7b9 - Ebdim
G7b9 - Ddim
C7b9 - (ALSO) Dbdim
Chromaticism :-p
Theres a song ; Stone temple pilots ;Sour girl, ı cant solve ıts key and harmony. So complicated.. Chords
Verse ; Dadd11/A Bbmaj9 F G
Chorus ; Bbsus2#11 Fmaj9/A C G7 x2
I would say is Bb. G7 would be the secondary dominant. The dominant of the dominant of the key (C). Anyway... whatever
G mixolydian, but it’s also using blues harmony (the Bb note is classic blues). I wouldn’t call that Bb maj9 in the verse, the notes to me sound like Bb G C F which feels my like inverted Csus4/Bb or C7 sus4
If you think of it that way V-IV-bVII-I is a pretty normal mixolydian/Blues flavored progression.
I also wouldn’t call the chorus chord Bbsus2 #11, C7/Bb makes way more sense.
This is just trying to listen and pick out some chords on a listen thru, I didn’t transcribe it fully and I haven’t taken the melody into account. But it’s really not tonal harmony, it’s much more rock and blues harmony. If I had to name a key I’d call it G mixolydian or a G Blues.
Just my two cents.
I've been playing guitar for 2.5 years and I always just see a key as a series of notes that go well together, and a scale a series of notes in a key that are used well for certain moods and contexts.
3:40 those are modes of keys, not different keys, still a great video and I learned a lot! Great considerations as well!
No, they're different (but enharmonic) keys, just as A minot and C major are different keys, but the same set of notes.
@@bfish89ryuhayabusa A minor isn't a different key than C major it's a mode of C major
Maybe sometimes they're referring to the whole tone scale? (Maybe not explicitly, but it's possible to be explicit about it too.) And then there are not two centres, but just whichever one makes sense in the light of the previous two or three notes. So then a potentially interesting question might be how many notes (or maybe even how many pulses?) are needed for the flow of the music at the present moment to have some direction.
And when it lacks that, I suppose you could understand it as an eddy? Or turbulence? The idea of a song as being very close to analogous to a river makes intuitive sense to me. Or it could be a mud puddle if you made it that way - but even that is water that could move when the horse splashed his great big hoof in there ... now. Sploosh. 1/1000 of an Ozrics song, and it was but a horse that made it. Miraculous, no?
Take a song like *Helen and Heaven* that begins with what I'm almost sure is some whole tone lines, anyway, and maybe that's a way to signal that "this stream is a little bit turbulent, so all we can tell you now is that we'll be going forward from here - i.e. it's not going to be a tadpole puddle song". Explicitly the whole tones might tell you something like that. And then later on when the quieter little high notes, up near the range where the dogs prefer their music to be, and almost out of earshot from down there in the main stream, where you human listeners are spinning around from chute to pool to vortex, are not completely ... determined? ... by the main stream of the song, you're OK with it. Because the whole tones said the center might move around and even bifurcate if it wished. Makes analysis more difficult, I suppose, but perhaps also more interesting, if you find a song (or little, less distinct, side channel sonic sequence flows) that demands something interesting when it comes to a dissecting/analytic version of understanding.
Which *Helen and Heaven* ? Tim's. The late Tim Smith, of Cardiacs and other projects. (I might be wrong about the whole tone scale, and even about the divergence of the squeaky little sideshows of the song - but it's a lovely song, even if that's so, so no harm done). ua-cam.com/video/GCpTb-oZZRY/v-deo.html
A super-relevant book on this topic is Doll, Christopher. 2017. Hearing Harmony: Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era. University of Michigan Press.
“Keys” only really matter in the context of performing, and also only for instruments which rely on them (thus, primarily in Classical music), and even then it’s only really relevant as a notational concept. Like, woodwinds and brass, transposing instruments which are essentially designed to operate in specific keys, you *need* to be able to comprehend the key in order to accurately play the instrument; but this begins to collapse with instruments such as fretted strings which are essentially just a continuous line of chromatic pitches in which the fingerings remain the same, just moved up or down and slightly compressed, or in vocal music. The idea of a “tonal center” is much more flexible (although it still doesn’t work for all music… but literally nothing ever will), and I think more valuable overall. But because the notational system we use today still relies on “keys” to work effectively, we’ll never stop arguing about this. A lot of modern theorists, including the UA-cam ones, seem to be of the opinion that you should just use whatever system allows the music to make the most sense from a notational and analytical perspective, which is honestly fine by me. We spend far too much time arguing about dumb stuff like what key a pop song is in and not nearly enough time discussing the creative and unique things the song does to make itself so hard to pin down in the first place. (Though it seems to me like 90% of the time it’s just modulation, and the average person doesn’t understand what modulation is, so.)
I don;t disagree with your larger point, but keys are (or were) more than just a notational convention. Sonata form is all about a narrative of modulating to different keys and returning to the home key. It's the animating concept behind that whole form. To 18th and 19th century composers (especially before the rise of equal temperament), keys were a strongly felt reality.
POV: you're a music theorist and everything is going off the rails
What you're saying is plausible, but does it only make sense in tempered tuning? Does it also work in tunings that use purer frequency ratios?
I’m glad someone is saying it out loud.
Love the Celeste reference in there. 👍
Thanks for the sweet video! Can you please analyze the song "Stash" by Phish?
There is tonal gravity. One can modulate vertically or horizontally - by changing the axis of resolution (different note), or by changing the modality of the tonal set (displacing the notes surrounding). Doing both creates the most harmonic change, while to me modulating to a note that is diatonic to the original mode without changing any of the notes is the softest modulation (the tonal set does not change, just the endpoint or point of resolution). G major to A dorian is a softer modulation than G major to A minor, and G major to A major is a harder modulation than them. G major to Bb major is a harder modulation than all of them but made familiar through the modal modulation of G major to G minor, even though the modal distance makes it a harder modulation. But this is just identification of the tonal sets by naming them after the resolution point and modality relative to it. Logical, but mutable and capable of being obscured or made ambiguous.
When I write or improvise I still use keys as a basic framework but I continually find myself playing "outside" of those keys and focusing more on chord or note relationships (mind you I mainly play metal)
I love this stuff and have no idea why.
In jazz improv often the only thing in our minds is the key of the chord we're playing over, and the one we're going to. You can think of a 2, 5, 1 in C, or in D Dorian, G Mixolydian and then C. And there's a million different scales you can play over those instead
In western classical music, the dominant relationship is very, very, very commonly more important than the tonic chord, and it’s weird to hear this whole diatribe without that being discussed? I can see that being less important in modern popular music where loops & note collections are more important than resolutions, but it still felt weird to not have this not mentioned when basically any late tonal rep would have dominant relationships (often in absence of the I chord) as the most important determinant for “key.”
I think you touch on something interesting: analyzing music as a complex. Trying to use mainstream music theory to understand blues can be an interesting challenge, but is probably not the best angle-- perhaps its better to look at it (and other forms of music) as an assemblage of rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, timbral, lyrical, and performance practices.
Wait you guys actually hear music in a key? Like I make music but I don’t hear music in keys, I hear music in pitches and tones sure and as music, but there’s no sense of confusion I get trying to figure out what key a song is in. I don’t get it.
Could it be safely argued that this is the reason why some modern instrumental music is written in the "Key of C" (i.e., no key signature for any instrument) just so the composer can explore some of these unusual and sometime ambiguous tonalities?
Maybe? I know some music is intentionally written like that (only temporary sharps and flats) for another reason as well: atonal music or when the key changes so often it’s simply easier to just write it like that, because (potentially dramatic) key changes every other bar makes no one happy.
This is amazing
I think the video should have been called "rethinking keys." In any music, different notes will always behave different ways in different contexts because the whole point of music is to communicate emotions and ideas. There will always be some pattern to it, though there are obviously myriad possible ways of drawing it out. The concept of a key only depends on whether your music has a single overarching motif to it, which would be associated with the root. So arguing about keys can sometimes be just as important as arguing about the narrative of the music itself even if nobody's inherently right.
"Sweet Home Alabama" is in G, even though it includes an F chord at the end of the chorus. V-IV-I is a common cadence, and makes infinitely more sense than I-VII-IV.
The great song "The Lemon of Pink" by The Books has some really interesting harmonies but is in its weirdness somewhat ambiguous because the song doesn't seem to be focused on painting the picture with harmonies, but rather with texture, rhythmics and instrumentation. So, logically, near the ending of the song you can hear a band member saying "Are we even in major or minor?". I do believe he probably didn't really know at the moment, and that's awesome.
Yeah, man, existence precedes essence.
As I watched this video it occurred to me that many musicians do not have formal training and just play what sounds good without consideration of a key. So with more and more people writing their own music there will most likely be a departure from traditional musical composition
One piece (or set of pieces, rather) that does a good job kind of deconstructing the idea of "keys" is Hidemith's "Ludus tonalis", particularly "Fuga quarta in A: Con energia". The point of the pieces is to essentially transcend the idea of traditional tonality. Hindemith does this especially in this context of the fugue format; he uses fugal-style transformations and idioms in a new modernistic approach, in such a way that you cannot say that it is in "A major" or "A minor" or "A lydian" or anything else like that.
As a music composition major in a music college heavily centered around contemporary classical music, the idea of keys basically is irrelevant outside of analyzing pre-modernist style works. How would you ever ascribe a singular key to anything by Ives, or how could you attempt to attribute a key to a piece like Studie II by Stockhausen, or when you get to people like Harry Partch, how can you even conceive of keys in any traditional sense?
So yeah, I'm honestly a big fan of the idea of, at least in contemporary music writing, liberating ourselves from the hegemony of keys. Why limit what we can work with musically? Right now I'm writing a piece that has no key -- or perhaps you could say that the key area is never consistent though there might be local tonal contexts -- and in doing that, one thing I discovered when singing the melodies I wanted to write is that certain pitches were very intentionally not able to fit in a 12-TET context. One consonant melody I had went F# E G F# A G, except the A was about 30 cents flat, because it needed to be for the melodic contour to sound right. We don't have any codified tendency for a note that is "out of tune" in that regard like we might for, say, a flat-six which fall to the fifth, or a flat seventh which walls to the sixth, and so on.
I've sat in with others for jamming and when I asked what key the song is in... More times than not, I've gotten responses like, "well, there's an A chord int he song".
Surely the melody must be considered more prominently when determining the key of Toto's Africa and other songs discussed like Sweet Home Alabama. Another example is the large number of songs that avoid I but hang around IV and V (eg. Every little thing she does is magic verse, Dreams, My my my, Unravel, Teenage crime, Elevator, Strangers (Tia Gostelow), All night long, Don't you want me baby...and on and on...). The melody is what shows these songs are not lydian, but just avoid I.
Some songs just want to keep going 😆 never landing on the one
Lots of modern wind band and brass band music have what can be argued as ambiguous or wandering key centres, so much so that the composer doesn't bother putting a key into the parts themselves regardless of transposition. Listen to Music of the Spheres by Philip Sparke or Harrison's Dream by Peter Graham and try to pinpoint a single tone centre at any one part of the piece.
Agree completely. While the composer's name is escaping me right now, all the instrument parts are in C major, all the keys are written in accidentals as well.