United States or Niue ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In different ages an entirely different capacity of expression, often an exactly opposite color, has been attributed to each separate key. In the eighteenth century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous key indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far as to call it tonum voluptuosum.
If before Calvisius C-major was the erotic key, in the seventeenth century G-major was considered so; in the eighteenth, on the contrary, when love poetry jumps from the merry and playful over to the sentimental, the musical ear likewise altered accordingly, and even before the time of Werther and Siegwart the languishing, gently melancholy G-minor was the fashionable tone, for the erotic Matheson, indeed, even goes so far as to declare that it is the "most beautiful of tones" an opinion which is certainly characteristic of the state of nerves of the world of culture at that day.
We, on the contrary, consider G-major particularly modest, naïve, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even trivial. Aristotle ascribes to the Dorian key, which corresponds approximately to our D-minor, the expression of dignity and constancy; five hundred years later Athaenaeus also calls this key manly, magnificent, majestic.
Word Of The Day