How can A minor key have a sharp chord in it?
Basically I am learning piano, so I was trying to play an Indian song 'Janam Janam' in the key of A minor. 2 chords are out of scale but they don't give a dissonant sound and melody. They are A sharp major and E major which don't belong to the A minor key.
Please help.
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OK, let's look at the piece. This is a very simplified version I found online, transposed into A minor (or at least with a starting chord of A minor). But it seens to line up reasonably well with the recording.
(I was expecting something more 'Indian'. This could have been written by Michel Legrand!)
We're in A minor. We rapidly re-focus on C major (but the relative major is barely considered a modulation.) The Dm chord isn't surprising in an A minor/C major environment, and the E7 run back to Am is bog-standard. So it's just the B♭ chord that's a bit of a worry.
Well, it's got two notes in common with the preceding Dm chord. We could explain it as an alternative colour of that chord. What I DON'T think we can usefully do is force it into some sort of 'cycle of 5ths' dominant relationship to the E chord after it.
I take it we're OK with E7 being part of A minor now?
It's very likely that the mode that Janam Janam uses is very much like the West's Phrygian mode, which features a flat second degree (B? in this case), which acts as an upper leading tone to the tonic. It would be common to set such a leading tone with ?II (B? major in this case) or ?vii6 (G minor in first inversion). It's also quite common with minor-like modes to sharp the melodic seventh degree to act as a lower leading tone to the tonic: that is almost invariably set with V (E major in this case).
Basically the answer to your question boils down to the relationship between chords and scales, and what "makes" a given key major or minor. In the case of the A#maj, the root is out of key (translating to a sharped octave or flat 2nd, depending on enharmonic context) but the double sharp third and fifth translate to the fourth and sixth of the natural A minor scale, so depending on what chord it resolves to there wouldn't be a big dissonance. With the E major, the G# which defines the chord as major is part of the A HARMONIC minor scale (the natural minor scale with a raised 7th) which again depending on the resolution of the chord produces a very pleasing "minor key feel".
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