I know next to nothing about musical theory. Torturous, mandatory participation in musical endeavors in youth taught me how to read music and the very fundamentals.
Why does changing the number of sharps and flats in the key so dramatically change the entire sound of the piece? Why is the key so important that famous pieces of music are billed as “Such and such in G major” or whatever?
I mean I know that some of the notes will be half a step higher or lower depending on what the key falls for. But I can’t imagine why that changes so much. I’ve heard songs like The Star Spangled Banner and other famous works played in a minor key and it completely changes the entire sound. How?
In: Culture
There’s two very important difference between “minor” intervals and “major” intervals that are hard to see just from how close they are to each other.
First and probably most important: Changing an interval will also change where the note will want to go. Major intervals tend to be very stable so they are comfortable being where they are, and if they do show any “desire” to go anywhere then the direction that they want to go tends to be up. (not always but it tends to be). A minor interval is generally less stable than a major interval (not necessarily dissonant but definitely less stable) so they have a stronger tendency to “go somewhere else”, and that tendency tends to drop them downward.
Imagine a very small melodic passage over imaginary notes that we will call 1 2 and 3. If your melody is “1 2 3” then we can very heavily change the “character” of our melody by changing what note 2 “wants”. Going 1 2 3 over a stable “2” note that kind of wants to rise up is going to give a very different character than going 1 2 3 over an unstable “flat 2” that really really wants to drop down.
A second and more advanced difference between minor and major intervals is that their harmonic character changes a lot more than what their small difference in frequency suggests. The notes notes might only be one semitone apart, but our harmonic experience isn’t dictated in the plane of semitones, but rather it is dictated on a plane of elegant harmony of frequencies that vibrate either at double, triple or quintuple each others frequency. I don’t think I can really ELi5 this so instead let me compare it to a knight in a game of chess. The knight does not move in single steps, but rather it takes these large leaps that are sort of “L” shaped. If I have my knight in square K5 and I want my knight to move to square K6 then you might go “that should only take one move, because it’s only one square next to him”. But the knight doesn’t move that way, so it’s going to take him several moves just to end up in the square next to him.
Harmony is kind of the same way, it does not move in simple steps of a semitone, so it needs to take several “turns” to end up in a square that looked like it was right next to them. As a simple example: There might be twelve semitones between the note C and its higher octave (also C), but it only takes one harmonic “turn” to move between the two, because their frequencies differ by an elegant multiplication of 2. So the third C on your piano and the fourth C are going to have near identical character; they are only one harmonic “move” away from each other. Meanwhile the difference between C and C#, while seeming very small, is actually three harmonic “moves” away from each other.
The difference between a major and minor interval is in fact so big on the harmonic plane that they could be considered different “generations” of origin. The note D could be considered the “son” of the note C (that is to say, the note D originates from the natural resonance of the note C) whereas the note Db could be considered the “father” of the note C (that is to say, the note C exists in the natural resonance of the note Db, but not the other way around). Melodically speaking the notes Db and D are so close to each other, but harmonically they are so far away.
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