No Offense, But Marc-Antoine Charpentier's "Regles de Composition" is Wrong About the Keys, and Here's Why

you know the list. "gay and warlike." "obscure and sad." "serious and pious." nonsense

Every so often this little chart goes viral again, often with an invitation to readers to pick themselves, as it were, out of the image:

This apparently comes from, as the caption tells us, a 17th-century composition book. Now maybe they just had emotions Different in the late 17th century. A lot can change about subjective experience in four hundred years. Harold Bloom said Shakespeare invented human interiority only like a hundred years before that, so really, maybe it’s like how babies can’t see yet. We were still working out the kinks. We were test-driving our feels. Still, anyone who has perfect pitch and very strong, immediate emotional reactions to certain pieces of music — i.e. me — can see at a glance that this is wrong. Allow me to give some quick examples.