The opening, reminiscent of the first section of the Second Symphony, is cold, stony, relentless, with three bass-drums whalloping the ears at regular intervals; and when the organ thunders the notes E-flat and G-flat, grating against the prevailing A-minor tonality, the mood turns fearful, as if judgment were being rendered from on high.
The tempo of a given song, as well as its major or minor tonality, also had an effect on how happy and alert listeners felt (what researchers call "arousal"), which in turn influenced their performance.
Inspired by J.S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, Chopin's preludes move up the circle of fifths (rather than Bach's chromatic scale sequence) to create a prelude in each major and minor tonality.
It ends with a dance movement incorporating three themes; the minor tonality does not detract from its vivacity.
The tone rows that are used in the 12-tone compositions of Schoenberg, like major and minor tonality in earlier music, are a technical substratum and must be no more explicit in the finished work than the chemical makeup of pigments in the Mona Lisa.
There is a good match here between the suite's D minor tonality, with its evocations of tragedy and menace, and the spikes, chains, gnarled surfaces, rolling fog and vast spaces of the computer-enhanced Carceri.
The unifying D minor tonality Maxwell Davies claims for his symphony is not always evident to the listener, but the brooding intense rhetoric is powerful nonetheless.
Mr. Lang's work, which memorialized an artist friend who was married on her deathbed, used tiny stepwise motions to effect a haunting suspension between major and minor tonalities.
The broader term tonality is sometimes used loosely for key, e.g., "The first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony exhibits a strong C-minor tonality".
While not abandoning triadic harmonies and major and minor tonalities, she significantly modified their sound and their expressive implications, not least - and not without some influence from Fauré and Debussy - by deflecting them in a variety of modal directions.
Parncutt, R. Major-minor tonality, Schenkerian prolongation, and emotion: A commentary on Huron and Davis (2012).
