The Three Minors

(entry for 11/15/24)

This sounds like the beginning of a joke: These three miners walk into a bar, their pickaxes over their shoulders.

Nope, that’s MINERS. The subject of this post is MINORS. (And the bar they walk into, in the US and Canada at least, will be called a ‘measure,’ instead.)

Major keys are nice and easy You know what they sound like. You know when one of the notes is ‘off.’ The fingering for the scales is predictable. Even majors with signatures like five flats or four sharps are no huge problem. Most people can even handle six sharps OK. (That’s F-sharp major, in case you were wondering.)

Minor keys are not so nice. And they do tend to have pickaxes over their shoulders, the better to impale you my dear.

A couple of posts ago, we talked briefly about modes, and we mentioned that the Ionian mode is identical to Major, and that the Aeolian Mode is identical to Minor. So that’s the minor we’ll start with. It’s called natural minor, for two reasons: 1. The minor that corresponds to the original Aeolian Mode (the key of ‘a’ minor) has an empty key signature, no sharps, no flats; in other words, all ‘naturals.’ 2. It consists solely of whole steps and half steps, nothing weird like an augmented second, and it sounds ‘minor’ throughout its length; no starting out in minor and then going to major, or vice versa.

Now it doesn’t have to stay in ‘a’ minor. That same scale and set of chords can be transposed into any key you like. All you have to do is have the correct key signature, and play or sing the notes accordingly. (Remember the rule about Relative Majors and Minors from last time.)

Remembering that the right-most sharp symbol in the key signature is either a half step below the tonic note of the major scale, or a whole step above the tonic note of the natural minor scale, it’s pretty easy to figure out where we are. If we’re in three sharps, he right hand sharp in the signature is G-sharp. So the major is A, and the relative minor is f-sharp. If you want to go the other way around, from the key to the signature, just reverse the process. If we want to play a b-minor scale, go up a whole step to C-sharp, and that is the right-most sharp in its key signature. (Two sharps.)

And a similar principle works with flats. The right-most flat is a perfect fourth above the major key name, and a major third below the minor key name. In other words, if the key you want is g-minor, then the right-most flat will be E-flat. In other words, two flats.

So much for natural minors. Which are now considered ‘modal’ to modern ears. Because they are!

But our ears have a weird tendency to want the five-chord in any key, whether major or minor (that is, the chord whose root is on the fifth degree of the corresponding scale) to be a major chord, with or without an added minor seventh on top of the triad, making it a dominant seventh chord. (See the post on four-note chords, which you can do by clicking HERE.)

So let’s say you’re in ‘a-minor.’ The natural scale is A B C D E F G A – all naturals. But the five-chord, the one built on E, the fifth note of the scale, in order to be major, has to have a G-sharp in it. Which doesn’t work in a-natural-minor because the G pitch in a-minor is natural, not sharp.

Which means we have to invent a whole new a-minor scale to accommodate our ears. This new scale goes A B C D E F G-sharp A, so that the E chord can have a G-sharp in it.

We call this new scale Harmonic Minor, because the harmony sounds better with the major E chord in the a-minor key. The chords sound great. The scale not so much. Note that the distance from F to G sharp is not any kind of whole or half step, which is what we are used to hearing in scales. It’s an augmented second. Easy to play, but very hard to sing!

So we invent a third kind of minor, to accommodate the singers. We keep the G-sharp, because that gives us the major five-chord that our ears like, but we also now sharp the F, so that we’re back to all whole steps and half steps. So now the scale up goes A B C D E F-sharp G-sharp A. Easier to sing as a melody, so we call it Melodic Minor. But there’s a catch. Voices approaching the tonic note from below prefer half steps for the last stair-step. (This is what we mean by the term ‘leading tone.’ The seventh degree of the scale ‘leads’ us up a half step to the home note, the tonic note.)

But those same voices prefer to go down in whole steps when leaving the tonic. A whole step below A is G, so now we’re back in Natural Minor again! In other words, Melodic Minor changes pitches only going up, not down.  A Melodic Minor scale is the only scale in which the pitches going up are different from the pitches going down!

To put it still one more way, the melodic minor scale is melodic going up, and natural coming down.

Now, one aspect of the melodic minor scale going up, is that the final four notes sound, major, not minor. Why? Because they are the same exact notes as the final four notes, going up, in the enharmonic major scale! So the melodic minor scale, when it starts out, does sound minor, but the second half sounds major. This is relieved somewhat by the fact that he descending scale reverts to natural minor. But it does present a weird problem for the person creating the harmony, whether that person is the original composer, or a later arranger. The melodic minor scale does not make good harmony. For one thing, the chord built on the sixth note of the scale is diminished, neither major or minor. Which does not sound good to our ears. That wouldn’t be a problem if it was the only diminished triad in the key. But it isn’t. The chord built on the seventh tone of the scale is also diminished! Which gives us two diminished triads in the same key, meaning we only have five chords left to ‘play with.’

The net result is that melodic minor is a very difficult type of minor to make good harmony in. So most composers and arrangers end up using both: the harmonic minor scale when the emphasis is on chords, and the melodic minor scale when the emphasis is on, well, melody! (Duh.)

Please note that the key signature does not change as we change the type of minor involved. We use the key signature that would be correct for natural minor, regardless of which kind of minor we’re actually using. The changed notes for harmonic or melodic are put in with accidentals, whether that’s sharps, flats, or naturals. As has been mentioned in a previous post, key signatures never mix sharps and flats in the same signature. But the same thing is not true of accidentals. If you’re writing out a harmonic scale in either d minor or g minor, you’ll have at least one accidental sharp, even though the key signature uses flats. These are the only two keys where this is true, but the first time you run into it, there may be some confusion, till you realize what is going on.  (Seeing a sharp in a key where the signature is flats is a good clue that you're in a harmonic minor key.)

The example at the top of this post is the top four notes of the g-harmonic-minor scale.

For melodic minor scales, there is no equivalent problem. You will never have both flats and sharps in the same key, not even as accidentals, if you stick to the melodic minor scale. Naturals, yes, with either flats or sharps, but not both flats and sharps. If both occur in the same key, then something else is going on. Namely, chromaticism, where anything can and does happen! As we already learned in an earlier post.

So that’s the three minors. They can put their pickaxes back on their shoulders and leave. Step-wise, please.

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