H ome’ is not just the place where we now live; it’s also the place where we first lived, and it’s the source of everything that our childhood meant to us.”
— Janet Schmalfeldt, keynote remarks at the 26th Society of Music Theory Conference, 2003.
Chopin’s piano Etude in G-flat major (6-flats key signature), Op. 10, No. 5 ‘lays so well’ under the hand. All black-keys and visually dense, sure. F-sharp (G-flat) major [D-sharp (E-flat) minor], all black keys, cognitively challenging. But, surprisingly, that Chopin Etude is as biomechanically natural as can be.
But what about timbrally and cadentially ‘natural’? What key signatures present expressive or rhetorical challenges, instead of cognitive or biomechanical ones? How about B minor (2-sharps key signature) for cello or viola? The tonic B puts this key a semitone below the pitch of the open bottom string on these instruments (C2 and C3, respectively). For a composer to sacrifice the gestural option of the low-note sonority on those instruments creates a unique sort of expressive tension or ‘challenge’.
I think a composer does not sacrifice the open low string unless the intent is specifically to deprive the player and the listeners of that sonority; unless the composer’s intent were to create an acoustic homeland where it is impossible to go, and to concomitantly make us aware of the land’s existence and attractiveness.
The ear and mind yearn to go to that note; the destination beckons. The transcultural naturalness of this is nearly universal. The metaphor of the tonic as a natural, cadential resolution is intuitive. Our familiarity with the timbres of each instrument makes us acutely aware of what registers are and are not being traversed; and the harmonies and voice-leading in the composition set up conditions that pull and pull toward the inevitable low. But the homeland stays impossibly beyond our reach. It is a powerful state of (psychic) exile.
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