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Christopher Buchenholz<br><br>> I find it curious that as educators, we shy away from the major=happy, <br>> minor=sad stereotype, yet when challenged, we are hard-pressed to find <br>> musical examples that dispel this notion, and the ones we do find are <br>> questionable, or unremarkable. It becomes especially difficult when <br>> we dispense with lyrics; does music written in major/minor evoke <br>> happiness or sadness without a textual context?<br>> <br>> When discussing major/minor with my students, I try and bring together <br>> other musical elements that reinforce the happy/sad convention. For <br>> example, pieces in major keys tend to be loud, fast, tutti, upbeat, <br>> rhythmic, etc. Pieces in minor tend to be slow, soft, fewer <br>> instruments, etc. It is relatively simple to find pieces in both <br>> major and minor that do away with some or all of these statements.<br><br> Sorry to quote this in full, but it is warranted here.<br><br> The problem with major=happy/minor=sad is not that it is difficult to refute empirically (or through examples), but that it is impossible to <i>establish</i>. The notion that affectivity in music is in any sense reducible to such a simplistic binary pair of concepts is grotesque and, if you please, hydrophobically anti-intellectual. Even if we agree that music is often affectively causal--and that is a fairly substantial "if"--there is no guarantee whatsoever that any combination of words, much less adjectives, can encapsulate or formulate the affective results of the listening experience.<br><br> In that sense, the idea that M=H/m=S is exactly not a convention, but a convention of a convention. The inherent logical slipperiness of such indirection is, alas, precisely what allowed a charlatan like Don Campbell to perpetrate the fraud of the Mozart Effect®. (I'm not kidding by adding the registered trademark symbol; that's what it is now, a brand of--egregiously specious--musical causality.) Put in another, slightly more affirmative fashion: what causes people to say that a given piece is "happy" or "sad" is only indirectly musical. As even cursory examination of cultures in which affective musical coding was a living language--18thc. Europe, contemporary Iran--shows, mere reduction of the profound nuances involved to simplistic adjectives is the opposite of the cultural experience at hand--the occasional oafishness of affect theorists like Mattheson to the contrary.<br><br> Proof of a kind comes from the fact that adherents of the doctrine in question are obliged to verify their view through reference to the lyrics--which are resoundingly non-modal--or to point to the ironies or (putative) "contradictions" between musical mode and lyric meaning. If the core idea were correct, such disparities would be logically impossible or, more likely, self-resolving. And the notion that instrumental music presents a tougher case comes close to proving the absurdity of the idea in the first place. If mode made so manifest a difference, its affectivities should be clearer in instrumental music, not more obscure. In sum: we don't live this way, none of us, no matter how fervently we think otherwise.<br><br>MW Morse<br>Pbgh, ON<br>Trent University<br> </body>
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