C Sharp Minor

But take C in all its simple-mindedness, give it four sharps, and Rachmaninoff's lurking Prelude, his coruscating, foreboding Etudes-Tableaux emerge naked from the bath. C Sharp Minor is a Russian thing, foreign to Mozart and Haydn. It is bells, hammers, and ice: milder European climates do not engender it. Just because it shares its C with that Caribbean child, the sea of C, furnishes it with no similarities. To reach C Sharp from C, one must endure an endless Lewis Carroll progression like his symbolic logic, where dust is changed to frog in four steps, a linguistic version of six degrees of separation, where all people on earth are only six acquaintances away. In the same way that words and people can morph quickly into distant relatives, for example, T. S. Eliot and toilets, so chords can undergo similar changes. The intermediary stages which are required are known as great circles, like the great circle routes which are in fact straight lines turned into arcs by the curve of the world.

    These great circles travel in packs of four and five, wherein notes progress, not one after another in single file like obedient children, but instead by jumping many intervals at a time, until every note in the scale has been gradually played.

    Ironically, you have to play lapfrog or leapdog with these progressions, and work your way through all the sharp keys, before you get to the flat keys. So even though the black keys on a piano represent both a flat and a sharp, they are far removed from each other in the leapfrog world, which is why D Flat and C Sharp sound so different: they are not Siamese twins, but only distant fifth cousins. Harmonically, they have no genes in common.