Key Signature Dramaturgy Over an Entire Score

A while ago, I saw a Youtube video by a fellow composer who has her fair share of work experience as composer and assistant in Hollywood.

While I agree with many of her statements and find her videos highly informative she was recently making a statement that I found rather problematic.

In a nutshell, she said that when you write a score, you should remain in roughly the same key(s) throughout the entire score, even if it's a feature length.

Now, I can absolutely understand the reasoning behind such a statement as this strategy will make it easy to accomodate for changes after the scoring session, where this will allow to edit cues, cut them together etc. more easily. If you have different keys all over the score, it is considerably harder to make them work in the edit process in case something needs to be altered.

So it is considerably safer in this regard to just settle for one or a few keys with your score and write every cue in these keys.

However, I see a big problem in such a strategy, but I need to take the long road to make my point about it.

With the advent of equal temperament, theoretically every key should be more or less similar. In older literature you might be able to find charts that characterize every key with that refer back to the times before equal temperament was standardized, such as this highly entertaining chart.

Now while equal temperament has theoretically eradicated these key differences, especially with acoustic instruments such as in the orchestra, we still get just intonation from time to time (e.g. for a string player, an F# is slightly lower than a Gb). Even more relevant is however the favourite keys of certain instruments that I covered in a lengthy article a while ago.

So choosing a key even if it is not particularly resonant on the instruments that you're writing for might not be a great idea to begin with.

However, this still is not the biggest problem that I see with her statement. The problem doesn't necessarily lie in the choice of key but more in the consequence to largely avoid key changes, no matter whether in small or large structures.

Changing the key is one of the most dramatic devices that we have in music. Symphonies and operas of epic proportions have been written with an elaborate strategy of key changes that were placed at pivotal moments to create a dramaturgic shift.

Generally speaking, we say that if you change a key towards a "sharper" key, the music becomes brighter and towards a "flatter" key it becomes darker. While I would argue that this is not the case in each and every occurance, as a general rule of thumb, it surely is usable.

Just take the famous Bolero, which for more than 15 minutes sustains on a C major tonality. Close to the end, it switches almost unpreparedly to an E major tonality which is the absolute climax of that piece and feels extremely bright and fresh. So just this small example of the importance of key changes shows how problematic the statement is to remain in certain world of keys if you score a narrative medium.

Film scores are no less a large musical form, just because they consist of smaller cues with gaps in between doesn't make them lacking an overarching dramaturgy and narrative structure. Consciously deciding to avoid introducing fresh pitch material into a score or slavishly returning back to a "standard" pitch material reduces the expressiveness of the music considerably. It is almost like deciding to take an entire dimension out of your music concept.

If you have been following me for a while and have read my several rants about the current state of media music, you know that I see the reduction of musical expressiveness as one of the biggest problems in today's media music.

There are countless film scores by the great masters that crafted an elaborate key signature dramaturgy into their scores. Even if cues are several minutes apart and the audience might be forgetting the tonality of the last cue, constantly circling back to the same few keys with every cue that you write is definitely going to make your musical language extremely static. Even if you don't work out a specific dramaturgy of different keys to structure your score on, the simple power of introducing new pitch material or be able to modulate as a dramatic device should be reason enough to not use the same key all the time.

Now of course it is for everybody to decide whether the availability of more musical expressiveness outweighs the practical advantages of the same key all the way through as explained at the beginning. I can see that a score based largely on subtle underscoring and reduced textures might work perfectly fine with a limited set of keys so it might be very depending on the project and I would also factor in the argument that "the audience and client won't care or even notice". Yet, only working to the point where your client is happy or you "get the job done" at least for me is no standard that I would be happy with.

I am aware that my points of view might be impractical and not particularly suitable for the way the industry works in the 21st century, but on the other hand, there are countless examples of film scores that survived decades and are still considered iconic and that use the maximum available musical expressivenes without making "practical compromises". I doubt that scores that among other decisions "for practicality reasons are written in one key" will stand the test of time in a similar way.