C Major

Each key has its calling card. The key of C is a plain Jane planet, bland and juvenile, lending itself to the things of childhood, such as Mozart's sonata, his rondo, Debussy's Dr. Gradus Ad Parnassum, and Prokofiev's gleeful kindergarten romp of a Concerto. Why such simplicity? C Major, being the easiest key, because it has none of those finger-tripping, eye-stopping sharps or flats, is the first any pianist or composer learns, and thus identifies with the naive memories of first love, those awkward arpeggios, banal beauties, and comforting chords we learn with the light slanting depressingly through our grandparents' Victorian blinds, every detail of those rooms as branded on our lives as those deficient compositions themselves, certain scales recalling for no reason the fuzz on the grim rug, the grime on the ivories, every non-musical event memorized, along with its equally dubious musical themes, so that our practice sessions throb and strum with their own movie motifs in our blotter-like indiscriminate burgeoning blackboards of blank baby brains.

    But even without those first efforts in C, so hard to memorize, so impossible to forget, which still run through our heads like the Certs commercial or the Castro Convertible theme, even without that initial repertoire which condemns C forever to the role and rote of its puerile prison, C emerges harshly in the white glare of the keyboard, without the gaslamp halo of softening flats, or the character-building punches of aggressive sharps.

    C is the Wonderbread key, completely colorless, la-la-la forever on one note, a white-sale, sail-white monotone that agglomerates such a flatland landscape of similar white-out non-events drawn like filings around its magnetic void as to discourage the great grotesque cathedrals of sharped gargoyles and flatted buttresses which call out mockingly to the groggy composer, bedded cozily down in his domestic little downy sea of C.