When you look at a painting, what do your eyes perceive? What colours or shapes are they drawn to? Which part of the image do your eyes focus on, and what are they aware of in the periphery?

Now think what your ears perceive when you hear a piece of music and ask yourself the same questions. What colours come to mind? What shapes can they pick out? Which part of the music do the ears focus on and what can you hear in the background?

What is tonality?

There is a lot to explore in the tonality of music. For those that know tonality as the key of the piece, this is only the very tip of the iceberg. The tonality is what defines the entire sound world of a piece of music. The so-called "sound world" encompasses the range of tones used, their relation to each other and the hierarchy they form within the piece.

This hierarchy is formed of strong tones and weak tones, with the strongest tone known as the tonic. The tonic is the note and triad that is the most stable within the tonality, therefore the music is arranged around it. The name of the tonic is also the name of the key; for example in the key of C major, the tonic note and triad is C.

Hearing tonality

Tonality is very much an aural concept, but one which most of us comprehend without even realising. When we listen to a piece of music we become tuned in to its so-called “sound world.” Many pieces share the same tonality, the most common of which in our culture is the major and minor scale.

When listening to a piece in these familiar tonalities, our ears have been trained to recognise either when a piece of music has finished or when it remains unfinished. This recognition is accomplished over a lifetime of hearing music in this tonality.

Because we have all been conditioned to the major/minor tonality, it makes it easy for our ears to pick up mistakes when playing. While everyone has the basic ability to recognise a "wrong" sounding note, this skill can be refined so that we can tune in to tonalities in even greater detail. This can be done to the extent that we can anticipate notes in our heads to help us guide our hands to the correct keys.

A good way to hone this skill is to transpose simple pieces of music. A common mistake a lot of students make when starting out is to begin playing their piece on the wrong note. If a student is about to do this, however, I do not correct them. Instead, I let them play it and allow their ears to pick up that something is not right. We will then discuss why something which sounds perfectly good when begun on C sounds totally different when begun on a B or a D.

Encouraging students to transpose music also helps them understand the need for key signatures. The simplest transposition is usually C to G or F, which often won't require the student to incorporate any black notes for the music to be transposed correctly. Moving up the circle of fifths to D major will certainly require an F-sharp (as well as potentially a C-sharp). Upon realising that every single F and C must be sharpened for the piece to sound "correct", the necessity of key signatures becomes apparent.

Colour in music

You may have heard the word "colour" used before to describe musical works. It may seem like an abstract concept but colour in music is very real and easy to perceive if the performer has an awareness of it and how to expose it. Colour is something that many composers were fascinated by - in particular, Olivier Messiaen, who said that he could perceive colours in certain chords and the combinations of these colours was rudimentary in his compositional process.

How do we add colour to a performance? It is not something so simple as an ingredient that can be added or subtracted, but rather an atmosphere which is created if the piece is played in a certain way. As a classical musician, one of the big questions we face is this: how can we continually render pieces that are hundreds of years old in ways that keep them fresh and current? An answer is by experimenting with fine details of a piece to draw out different colours.

Colour is one of the most expressive ways that musicians can use to vary their performance while still adhering to all of the instructions given by the composer. To play a piece with colour, the performer must first be secure in the technicalities of playing the music. Once this is achieved, he or she can then experiment with subtle changes to the music, such as weighting the hand differently over a chord to emphasise a different note, changing the balance between the right hand and left hand, or deciding the give the inner voices slightly more or less prominence. Changes to all of these modest variables will affect the colour of the music.