Non-musician obviously.
I hear Do-Ray-Me…etc but can’t get the rest.
Thanks- love music and looking to understand it better.
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A key is just a series of notes (a scale) that forms the basis of a piece in Western music – those notes give a piece structure and help it to tell a story. The Do-Re-Me pattern is what we call a *major scale*, if you sing along it, you’ll hit every note in a major key, going up an octave. So if I start on the note C (Do), I would hit the following notes:
Do- Re- Me- Fa- Sol- La- Ti- Do (again)
C – D – E – F- G – A – B – C (again)
So those are all of the notes in the C major scale, going up an octave (an octave is the distance between two notes with the same name – a C and a C or an A and another A). If I’m composing a piece in C major, I’m going to be using mostly those notes. Going outside of those notes will sound unusual – and that will help to tell part of my story. If I stick to those notes and familiar chords (notes sounded together) within this key, my music will sound familiar and harmonious, for the most part.
Using notes like Bb or F# that aren’t normally in that key will sound unusual around those other notes – maybe I can use that to make part of my music sound a little more tense. Maybe I’ll use those off-notes in order to resolve comfortably to the notes that are part of my key. Maybe I’ll use those off-notes to change keys, and switch to the key of Eb minor in order to create an interesting bridge in my music, before coming back to C major. There are a million ways to play with that structure – like all art, we have rules in place to provide a starting point, and breaking those rules allows us to mess with expectations in interesting and unique ways.
Of course, the whole topic can get a lot more complicated than that (there are minor keys, different modes of scales, complex chords and inversions, etc), but them’s the basics. A key exists to give a general, familiar structure to music. How much we choose to use those keys, move between them, find places where they match and intersect, or find ways to break them entirely, is what making music is all about.
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