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Key Matters

Music: Classical

Ivan Hewett explores how different musical keys seem to have distinct characteristics

Ivan Hewett explores how different musical keys seem to have distinct characteristics and create specific moods

Key Matters: Series 3

Key Matters: Series 3: Episode 4: F Minor

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Episode 4

Episode 4: F Minor

Series 3

F Minor

BBC Radio 4 - Key Matters, Series 3, F Minor

Ivan Hewett is joined by harpsichordist Terence Charlston to explore the key of F minor.

Ivan Hewett is joined by harpsichordist Terence Charlston to explore the strangely distorted and weird-sounding key of F minor.

In "Key Matters", Ivan Hewett explores the way in which different musical keys appear to have unique characteristics of their own. In this fourth programme, Ivan is joined by harpsichordist Terence Charlston, to explore the key of F minor. This is a key which acquired its unique personality for historical reasons to do with tuning systems of early keyboard instruments. Under these tuning systems, F minor didn't really work and sounded distorted and frankly, weird. Although tuning systems gradually got sorted out, composers such as Bach and later Beethoven and Schubert, remembered the distorted nature of F minor in the past and so used this key, to write anguished and stormy music.

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