Some days, I sit at the piano and doodle, playing nothing in particular for some unspecified period until I eventually stop. What happens next depends entirely on the amount of music I’ve chewed through the previous week: adventurous or gentle, thickly slathered or flimsily constructed. Little is uniform in these twiddling sessions, save for the general shape of the creations (start, go for a bit, reach an optimum point, begin to shrivel, die unspectacularly), and that they always seem to begin in C Major. And of the few silly classical music takes that I currently hold dear (Delius: good, Vaughan Williams: less good, listening to music at A=432Hz: less good still), the idea that C Major is the worst key is one I will defend to the hilt.
Can a key really give you the ick? If it can, then it’s through its association, rather than anything inherently wrong with it (an “it’s not you, it’s me” moment for the discipline of musical aesthetics). In the hundreds of years that humble keys have walked this earth, Western Classical Music has moved far away from tonal essentialism, and the idea that keys have fundamental traits. Still, it’s fun to glance at the history of composers and theorists’ adjectival indulgences, particularly in relation to the key of C. For Marc-Antoine Charpentier in his 1690 treaties Règles de composition, C Major was the equivalent of weapons manufacturer BAE Systems sponsoring London Pride: “gay and warlike.” For synesthete Amy Beach, C Major was simply “white.” Theorist Christian Schubart, writing in 1806, took that thought further: C Major is “completely pure—innocence, simplicity, naivety, children’s talk.”
Unlike its well-connected circle of cousins, C Major is yet to fully shed its infantile image, probably because it is so ingrained in the experience of youth. C Major is listless piano students bashing out their first ever scale by pressing (with a single index finger) the seven white oblongs to the right of the middle oblong with the curly “C” (drawn in black felt-tip pen), missing out those scary other keys on fear of death, or even worse, dissonance. I guess the continued presence of the “C Major = juvenile” trope is unsurprising in a supposedly sophisticated tonal-metaphorical system that’s still yet to find a more nuanced way of introducing kids to major and minor keys than Happy and Sad.
What nobody is denying is that keys can have interconnected relationships through pieces, periods, and lifetimes, where battles can be fought and emotions contorted. A sudden tonal lurch can be heartbreak, or breakthrough—keys are the things music’s metaphors cling to. But jutting out in that landscape of self-contained relationships is the feeling of C major, and its innocent naivety, in the words of Schubart. Might C Major be able to give us a bit more? Dirty, salubrious, austere, bleak, impure, just like its cousins? Or is it simply the most boring of all the keys?
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