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Although B major is usually considered a remote key (due to its distance from C major in the circle of fifths and fairly large number of sharps), Frédéric Chopin regarded its scale as the easiest of all to play on the piano, as its black notes fit the natural positions of the fingers well; as a consequence he often assigned it first to beginning piano students, leaving the scale of C major ...
In the key of C major, these would be: D minor, E minor, F major, G major, A minor, and C minor. Despite being three sharps or flats away from the original key in the circle of fifths, parallel keys are also considered as closely related keys as the tonal center is the same, and this makes this key have an affinity with the original key.
The pattern of whole and half steps characteristic of a major scale. The intervals from the tonic (keynote) in an upward direction to the second, to the third, to the sixth, and to the seventh scale degrees of a major scale are called major. [1] A major scale is a diatonic scale. The sequence of intervals between the notes of a major scale is:
Mozart and Haydn wrote most of their masses in C major. [3] Gounod (in a review of Sibelius' Third Symphony) said that "only God composes in C major". Six of his own masses are written in C. [4] Of Franz Schubert's two symphonies in the key, the first is nicknamed the "Little C major" and the second the "Great C major".
Such labeling requires the choice of a "first" note; hence scale-degree labels are not intrinsic to the scale itself, but rather to its modes. For example, if we choose A as tonic, then we can label the notes of the C major scale using A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, and so on. When we do so, we create a new scale called the A minor scale.
Claude Debussy's Suite bergamasque does this: in the third movement "Clair de lune" the key shifts from D-flat major to D-flat minor (eight flats) for a few measures but the passage is notated in C-sharp minor (four sharps); the same happens in the final movement, "Passepied", in which a G-sharp major section is written as A-flat major.
In Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, Franz Liszt takes the unusual step of changing the key from D-flat major to C-sharp major near the start of the piece, and then back again to B-flat minor. Maurice Ravel selected C-sharp major as the tonic key of "Ondine" from his piano suite Gaspard de la nuit .
When a musical key or key signature is referred to in a language other than English, that language may use the usual notation used in English (namely the letters A to G, along with translations of the words sharp, flat, major and minor in that language): languages which use the English system include Irish, Welsh, Hindi, Japanese (based on katakana in iroha order), Korean (based on hangul in ...