Food For The Soul: My Love Affair With Minor Key Music
Isn’t it funny how we generally associate minor key music to emotions like sadness or sorrow? Or how in movies you'll always hear minor key music with scenes of darkness or destruction. Although this is not true across the board, there is a general stereotyping of sounds, and what we associate them with in our everyday life and emotions. We're taught to make these associations, almost like a programming from childhood, and at the very least in the general education that we receive at school. What I find fascinating is how a sound can mean a feeling, how it translates to thoughts and words.
Music has always been in my life, having started playing the piano at 7 years old after begging my parents to take me to a teacher, and then studying music throughout high school. I have always been drawn to minor key music. I find quite the opposite to the general consensus, minor key music is expressive and open, it’s melodies always uplifting and hypnotic. I find a certain purity in these little black keys and a rawness that I cannot find in major key melodies. But hey, that’s just me.
I came across this piece this morning, by a singer I wasn’t familiar with. It struck me with a full force, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. Some of the comments from other listeners suggest that the songwriter is suggesting a religious reference in the lyrics, a return to God. Personally, I think there are many other connections to be made with the words, such as the battle between fear and freedom, or life and death. I find that this song speaks to me about the concept of choice and the purity of being honest with yourself.
In Other Worlds ~ Azam Ali
The key to this place
Is a cold you know
The real dispelled
Into the world you know
Doubt, tasted, you fall in
Down you sink
Into her deep devour
She's still the key holder
And through this portal
She courts you now
Endowed with will
And a course your own
Bound by the despair
Of the shoreless hours
Heed this flame
Within the walled empire
This desire
Is all around
She's still the key holder
And through this portal
She courts you now
If love be revealed
In the spark of an eye
Could all be redeemed
In the sea of time
If the stars embed
Like nails into the ground
From the unheard prayers
That have torn up the skies
Would you will it all away
As you sail on your way?
Music is a kind of liberation, that we are lucky to be able to indulge in. A way of learning about other people’s worlds, and their own eternal truths. A way of exploring human nature, in the most intimate sense, by being invited into the inner workings of a musician's mind.
Music has always been a freedom if one cares to let it in.
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