Happy minor songs & sad major songs.

[tobybear]

Though the page is in German, you might take a look at the first four sound samples for some examples in classical music:
http://gegenform.de/publikation/beispiele.html

The first two are in minor key, but do not sound "sad".
The other two are in major key but are generally not considered "happy" in mood.

[anomandaris1]

Rondo alla turca isn't pure minor - it's happy because there are some arabic notes that give the happy mood, in the pathetique we have also major arps.

"when we start learning music, we are taught that minor is sad, major is happy"

this is correct if we say - 1-4-7 - bright and harmonic, 1-3-7 darker - the examples here are not correct - happy minor and sad major - in one minor or major key song, we can use all kind of chords, dissonant stabs ala stravinsky, modulations to different keys, chromatism etc...

[neueliteratur]

i find it's more useful to think of minor as "soft" and major as "hard," which is what i've been told are the literal translations of "aoelian" and "ionian." though google translate doesn't seem to think so.

That would be awesome if it were true. That would mean that ancient Greece had a hard tribe, and a soft tribe.

this "duck" or "boney m" song is Major, not minor - chords are pure major

You're right. My musical mind was not in a sharpened state.

[Aroused by JarJar]

i find it's more useful to think of minor as "soft" and major as "hard," which is what i've been told are the literal translations of "aoelian" and "ionian." though google translate doesn't seem to think so.

so i'd put in danny elfman's Corpse Bride score in for a bittersweet, sometimes downright cheerful minor piece.

That's Dur and Moll, German, from durus and mollis (Latin), hard and soft, and didn't originally refer to the difference in feeling between the modes, but simply to the way the "b" was originally penned in notation in order to distinguish between B natural and Bb (which are called H and B in German).

The Greek modes were named after regions (and the original names refer to modes far different than what the names are used for today ) The ancient Greeks did have "hard" and "soft", too (there's argument about translation into English, you might see "tense" and "slack" for example), but that referred to microtonal tuning issues within the tetrachord, and works out very differently from current Western theory.

But history aside: I agree with you. "soft" and "hard" are much better generalizations than "happy" and "sad", because they're more like physical descriptions which are more emotionally neutral.

[Melkor]

Check this progression

Em - D - C - B7

Its minor, but sounds "happier" because 3 out of 4 given chords are Major.

Good pop writers do this all the time, ie disguise a minor key song as Major, by using the diatonic major chords juxtaposed against the tonic minor.


You can do it in reverse too, ie make Major progressions sound minor.

F - FMaj7 - C - C - F - Dm - Am - Am

This last progression is Major, but sounds quite forlorn "sad" and "conflicted".

[osiris]

http://soundcloud.com/illektrik1/entran ... losing-you

I did it (maybe). Above, a snippet of a sad song in D Major. (I think)

[jancivil]

i find it's more useful to think of minor as "soft" and major as "hard," which is what i've been told are the literal translations of "aoelian" and "ionian." though google translate doesn't seem to think so.

That would be awesome if it were true. That would mean that ancient Greece had a hard tribe, and a soft tribe.

according to Plato, they kinda did, though.
The Dorians (his tribe, his descendants, members of an oligarchy) were asskickers and the Lydians were losers.
(but their dorian (our phrygian) is of course anything but major.)

<In the Republic, Plato uses the term [harmonia] inclusively to encompass a particular type of scale, range and register, characteristic rhythmic pattern, textual subject, etc. (Mathiesen 2001a, 6(iii)(e)). He held that playing music in a particular harmonia would incline one towards specific behaviors associated with it, and suggested that soldiers should listen to music in Dorian or Phrygian harmoniai to help make them stronger, but avoid music in Lydian, Mixolydian or Ionian harmoniai, for fear of being softened.>

they didn't say mode in them days, they said harmonia, which is more along the lines of stylee. Plato's crew had the *winning* stylee.