by Timothy Cummings
Unlocking the Mysteries of Musical Keys O
Playing the Highland Pipes with other instruments: Part Five
NCE upon a time, a well-meaning piper was asked to play Amazing Grace at a church, with pipe organ
accompaniment. The organist, having never before played with a Highland bagpipe, asked the piper what key Amazing Grace would be played in, to which the piper replied with complete confidence, “A” (be- cause, of course, the drones are always tuned to A). So the piper began to play Amazing Grace in the usual manner, and the organ- ist began to play a standard A-major chord progression for the hymn, and the result was tremendously disgraceful and unholy. The piper became agitated and angry, the organist flummoxed and flustered, the pastor began flipping through a field guide on exor- cisms, and amongst the congregation there was great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sound familiar? If you haven’t experienced
something like this yourself, I’d wager you prob- ably know of some poor soul who has. Those of you following this series on ‘Playing
the Highland Pipes with other instruments’ will probably now know why ignorance was decid- edly not bliss, for once: the piper in the above story neither knew what key Amazing Grace is written in, nor did s/he know what key it sounds in when played on the modern High- land bagpipe. (Of course they happen to be two different keys, and neither of them are A.) Indeed, the piper would have been producing Amazing Grace in the key of E-flat (E¨) — and possibly a sharp E¨ at that — which, as it so happens, is the most clashing, dissonant key in relation to A. This augmented-4th interval is so dissonant it was once avoided by church musi- cians and referred to as Diabolus in Musica, or “the devil in music”. The irony of it all would be comical if it didn’t happen so often, and with such hellish results. Thus, you can see why it’s really important to be able to determine both the keys of your favourite tunes, and also what keys they sound in depending on which bagpipe you are playing. Armed with this knowledge, you can prevent the sort of musical train wreck mentioned in
PIPING TODAY • 16
IN the previous four features on Playing the Highland Pipes with other instruments we aimed to give the piper the information to set your pipe chanter to concert pitch, understand what key the pipes were sounding when at concert pitch, and what other instruments had to do to be in tune with the pipes — without really exploring the theory. In this feature, Tim Cummings takes one of the topics from a previous feature a step further, “Finding the Key”, (Piping Today, Issue 53, Part 3), and explores the theory of how to work out what key a tune is in. To do this he uses the names of the chanter’s notes as we all know them A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, to discover that tunes are in the key of A, or D, or Em and so on. These keys that Tim arrives at are the user-friendly key names that would be used by most other musicians like fiddlers or guitarists, or that would be sounded by Border pipes or smallpipes, but pipers need to remember that they are not the actual key that the Highland pipes are sounding. To find out the actual key as sounded by the Highland pipe when the chanter is set to concert pitch, just follow Tim’s advice to find the key of a tune then refer to the Example One table to get the actual key.
Defining “key”
the above re-enactment. Not only that, but you can also vastly improve your relations with other musicians, and even improve your own craft when it comes to piecing together more musical sets and medleys. For those of you with bagpipes that have baritone and/or alto drones (e.g. many smallpipes), you will also be able to enhance your music with more complementary drone tunings.
The topic of musical keys can be a messy one, but with a bit of luck, we might be able to make some sense of it.
TO start with, we should know what the term “key” refers to in regards to music. Smart Alecs among you will say that a musical key is the thing you press on a piano to make it sound, or perhaps it is the small metal tool you use to unlock the lid on the piano. Yes, those are musical keys, but those answers will not help you in a church full of wailing and gnashing of teeth. The key I’m talking about is a particular tonal realm, or musical colour scheme, if you will. A more official definition is thus, courtesy of the Oxford American Dictionary (3rd ed.): 4. a group of notes based on a particular note and comprising a scale, regarded as forming the tonal basis of a piece or passage of music. Clear as mud? Okay, take two... I often like to think of musical keys as
painters’ palettes, whereby each key is a dif- ferent palette with a different set of colours available to the artist, and where each key, or palette, will have one prevailing colour. In the bagpipe-friendly key of A, for example, you will have the following different ‘colours’: A, B, C(#), D, E, F(#), and G, with the A being the most prevalent and influential. If we were
PROFILE
CONCERT PITCH
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