Wiktionary
n. (minor key English)
Usage examples of "minor keys".
We'll finish the discussion we started last time about modes and the changeover to major and minor keys.
It was these souls I thought of, Canadian as I am by birth, but half-Gypsy by blood, as I listened to Liszt's three final Hungarian Rhapsodies, all in minor keys, and all speaking the melancholy defiance of a medieval people, living in a modern world, in which their inveterate criminally expresses itself in robbing clothes-lines and face-to-face cheating of gadje who want their fortunes told by a people who seem to have the old wisdom they themselves have lost in their complex world of gadjo ingenuity, where the cheats and rogueries are institutionalized.
My ears kept chiming in discordant minor keys, and there was a taste of bile in my throat.
It began with whispers of hope, bits of brighter melodies unexpectedly appearing among the minor keys like small patches of blue sky peeking out between storm clouds.
She gave an odd little quivering sigh as I went into her, a husky sound that seemed to hit several notes at once, like a sound from one of those medieval Indian instruments that were tuned only to minor keys and produced sad twanging modal tone clusters.
Just watching him leaning against a wall, singing ancient folk songs in shivery minor keys, was a distinct pleasure.
And it was filled with the rhythms, the modulations to minor keys, that seemed to characterize the music of the mountain folk.
We used to sit together on the wharfs down on the New York water-front, he with a bassoon and me with an oboe, and we'd blend minor keys in African harmonics a thousand years old until the rats would crawl up the posts and sit round groaning and squeaking like dogs will in front of a phonograph.
He did, having studied piano in his youth, but counterpoint and the mysteries of minor keys were far beyond him.