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Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and / or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions, and directionality.. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or the root of a triad with the greatest stability in a melody or in its harmony is called the tonic.
Major/minor compositions are musical compositions that begin in a major key and end in a minor key (generally the parallel minor), specifying the keynote (as C major/minor). This is a very unusual form in tonal music, [ 1 ] [ 2 ] although examples became more common in the nineteenth century. [ 3 ]
For example, the minor triad in root position is made up of the 10th, 12th and 15th harmonics, and 10 / 10 , 12 / 10 and 15 / 10 meets the definition of otonal. A better, narrower definition requires that the harmonic (or subharmonic) series members be adjacent. Thus 4:5:6 is an otonality, but 10:12:15 is not.
Major and minor third in a major chord: major third 'M' on bottom, minor third 'm' on top. Major and minor may also refer to scales and chords that contain a major third or a minor third, respectively. A major scale is a scale in which the third scale degree (the mediant) is a major third above the tonic note.
Major and minor, the adjectives used to describe the tonality of a scale, key, or chord; Major-minor tonality, a system of music in which specific hierarchical pitch relationships are based on a key "center" or tonic; Major/minor composition, a musical composition that begins in a major key and ends in a minor key; Major/Minor, an album by Thrice
Methods that establish the key for a particular piece can be complicated to explain and vary over music history. [citation needed] However, the chords most often used in a piece in a particular key are those that contain the notes in the corresponding scale, and conventional progressions of these chords, particularly cadences, orient the listener around the tonic.
Scales are named after their tonics: for instance, the tonic of the C major scale is the note C. The triad formed on the tonic note, the tonic chord, is thus the most significant chord in these styles of music. In Roman numeral analysis, the tonic chord is typically symbolized by the Roman numeral "I" if it is major and by "i" if it is minor.
Composer Charles Ives chose the chord C–D –F–G –B ♭ as good possibility for a "secondary" chord in the quarter-tone scale, akin to the minor chord of traditional tonality. He considered that it may be built upon any degree of the quarter tone scale [ 4 ] Here is the secondary "minor" and its "first inversion":