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My music teacher always rambles on about B flat minor, endlessly repeating how it is the key of death and is therefore used in movies for death scenes. Alright, I understand that it is minor, no problem. I get that it has the most flats of all the roots, simple. How can it be though, in essence, more minor than another scale?
A B♭ minor scale and an E♭ minor scale have the same relative intervals so why is there a difference? Is this way over my head? Have I missed some key music theory?
Music has nearly infinite potential for subtlety, and yes, drums might seem more simple on the surface, but after a few years in music school you'll be tuning drum heads every time you sit down at a snare drum, have a mallet collection that weighs 30 pounds, and enjoy discussing the relative merits of different origin rosewood on your marimba.
Most people have some sense of absolute pitch, even if it's just a subconscious association of things in the key of Bb minor with other things in the key of Bb minor. And yes, in a perfect equal temperament world (i.e. electronic music) every transposition is functionally the same as any other. However, different instruments respond differently in different keys, both as a consequence of their construction (open strings) and despite centuries of work to make timbre as consistent as possible.
However, I think the most compelling argument is the least subtle of all the above, and that is that up until the mid-18th century, classical keyboard music was not played in equal temperament! It was played in well temperament, which, like equal temperament permitted music to be played in all keys, but did not completely equalize every interval, so that every key did have a distinct (and distinguishable) "flavor".
Your teacher is referring to the Doctrine of Ethos which was for the Greeks, a belief that listening to a certain type of music influenced your mood or character as a person. Throughout the centuries, this belief has taken various forms - from the key of Eb used in marches for nobility, D major being joyous, C minor being introspective, D minor being "the saddest of all keys" (Spinaltap) and many others.
It has also been diluted into the two basic tenants of how people generally perceive harmony - happy / major, sad / minor.
So, when your teacher belabors how awful Bb minor is, they are referring to the ethos attached to that key, not the specific ordering of semitones or the arrangement of the scale. Not all scales or pitches are created equal (as much as Schoenberg et al. might have tried!)
This is another reason why some pieces, when arranged in a key other than their normative one, sound wrong. Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" sounds unbearable in any other key but C# minor, and this fact is attached to ethos as well.
A key's color, quality and difficulty are largely instrument dependent. For example, Bb minor rarely involves open strings on the stringed instruments and has fewer natural harmonic possibilities than, say, A minor. This leads to a "darker" sound on strings.
Bb is the natural scale starter for brass combos, so Bb minor is a natural for funeral marches. Brass instruments are decidedly not equally tempered, so different minors have different characters.
If you are playing a natural trumpet (valveless), and that's sort of the instrument type that was quite a bit around when the key associations were established, then a minor third is sort of an awkward interval to play. The interval is supposed to be 6:5, but in the overtone series you instead have to revert to something like 19:16 which is 18 cents flat.
So that gives you a somewhat exaggeratingly depressed minor scale when played with valveless trumpets. While the valves on modern instruments offer more possibilities for getting the intonation closer to equal temperament, all of the possibilities still are tinged, with the instrument better-suited to the Bb major scale.
So even nowadays, not every scale is equal. But the "ideology" around various scales developed way before modern instruments, with the scales (both major and minor) starting flat from C being mostly natural to brass and some other wind instruments, and the sharper keys being served better by string instruments (also remember that in Renaissance and before, even many bowed string instruments had frets and thus were somewhat fixed in the scales the tuning got optimized for).
A modern piano, and to some degree modern orchestras are not really making different scales sound all that much different in character. But the traditional associations are not completely arbitrary but founded in the instrumentation available and its characteristics in different keys.
I compose in B-flat minor for some time now.. And you can easily do a positive melody in this key. For me this scale has deep feelings and definitely lot of hope in it. So i believe it can be used for death in movies (to awake feelings), but kinda the way -everything is gonna turn around, not everything is lost.
B flat minor is the key of Chopin's famous funeral march. Thus, this piece may tie B flat minor to funerals and other places and times of death.
