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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.
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/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 ]
Looking at the C-major key as an example, there are three close related keys: G-major, A-minor and C-minor. C-major and G-major are keys whose 1st scale degrees are separated by a musical fifth (the pattern of relations is represented in the circle of fifths" for major keys). A-minor and C-major share the same notes of the scale but with a ...
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.
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.
For example, looking at the dark blue A minor triad in the graphic at the beginning of the article, its parallel major triad (A-C♯-E) is the triangle right below, sharing the vertices A and E. The relative major of A minor, C major (C-E-G) is the upper-right adjacent triangle, sharing the C and the E vertices.
Major and minor keys that share the same key signature are relative to each other. For instance, F major is the relative major of D minor since both have key signatures with one flat. Since the natural minor scale is built on the 6th degree of the major scale, the tonic of the relative minor is a major sixth above the tonic of the major scale ...