Performing Modulation

Once you’re really comfortable creating your map of key, it’s time to start making it more flexible by rearranging it at will!

This skill can be useful anytime you’re performing music and there’s a change of key. In later study, we’ll apply this skill to the domains of improvisation and sight reading. Here, we simply work on the foundational skill of changing your internally-set-up key.

Remember that key typically has two components: collection and tonic. When you’re seeking to transition to a new key, these are still the important aspects to focus on.

Of course, the most reliable way to change keys would probably be to stop the music and repeat the methods from the previous “setting up a key” section. But in most situations, this isn’t appropriate—the music needs to keep going! And while stopping and re-starting in this way may help us set up each key accurately in and of itself, it makes it difficult for us to feel the connections between the keys—an important element of a lot of music. It would be really useful to have quicker, “short-cut” methods that help us make a quick change—and such methods will be our focus here. Just note that they may not be reliable at first until the skills developed earlier in the chapter are more solid.

The primary method we’ll introduce is simply to focus on changing the half/whole-step context of the melody at the moment of modulation. Often, music works in such a way as to facilitate this: the melody comes to a certain scale degree in the first key, and then the melody continues from this same note, reinterpreted in a new key. Perhaps that note had a whole step above it in the first key but a half step above it in the second key: if so, then especially if we’ve really internalized the patterns in the “Setting Up a Key” section, we may be able to quickly visualize/hear that changed interval as we perform that note, helping us to lock in to the new key. Note that this method focuses on changing the collection, leaving the tonic implicit. If the “Setting Up a Key” methods are well-internalized, we can often still intuit the tonic from this change of collection; if not, we may need to strengthen those methods first.

Where this method doesn’t work (say, there’s no shared melody note across the two keys, or there’s a transitional section where neither key is clearly primary) or we just want to use a different method, we may need to rely on moment-to-moment strategies until the new key is established. We have all internalized a certain number of short, key-independent musical models, such as important intervals or triads or the ability to imagine playing something on our primary instrument. Whatever they are, we will need to apply them until the new key becomes clearly apparent. As we do so, we simply need to focus on how these models contribute to our sense of collection and tonic.