What is a Key Signature?

According to Wikipedia, a Key Signature is a set of symbols that tells us which notes are to be played higher or lower than their “natural” counterparts, and a Key is the resulting group of notes that serves as the basis for a piece of music.

Simple. The Key Signature (a symbol) tells us the Key (a scale). We often stop here, but watch out! This is not the whole story. In order for a Key to have meaning in Western tonal music, it needs two additional pieces of information: Resting Tone and Tonality.

For any given Key, there as many Resting-Tone-Tonality combinations as there are notes in the scale. With Western tonal music, that’s seven possible combinations per Key. Each note in the scale could be a resting tone, and each resting tone would result in a different tonality.

So here’s my challenge: let’s get rigorous about how we use these four terms to describe music - both on the page and in the air. Let’s open up the conversation to the many different possibilities within each scale - not just Major and Minor - and let’s give our students precise language to describe the music they see and hear.