GROUP TASK #17: The Key of Funeral Marches

Task

Volume 17 of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians identifies seven classic funeral marches. As it turns out 5 of those 7 marches are in the key of F minor. Test the hypothesis that funeral marches tend to be composed in the key of F minor.

In order to calculate chi-square, we need to determine the probability of any given musical work being written in F minor.

The following table shows a distribution of keys from a convenience sample of 3,121 works from the common practice Western art music tradition.

Tonic	Major	Minor
C	358	6
C#	2	2
D	194	96
D#	0	2
Eb	125	0
E	24	35
F	757	10
F#	2	4
G	978	119
G#	0	2
Ab	11	0
A	126	61
Bb	198	2
B	2	5
Totals:	2,777	344

Is the tendency to write funeral marches in F minor statistically significant at the 0.01 level?

Rationale

This exercise provides additional practice in calculating statistical significance using the chi-square test.