“Come on over a minute. I just had some ideas that I’d been thinking about for quite a while, about modulation.”

I’m a university student. 
Specifically, I’m in my second year of a Bachelor of Music majoring in Vocal Performance. I’ve been singing and playing piano my whole life. Probably the only reason I’m not pursuing a career in the film industry right now is because I can sing. 
This past couple weeks in my music theory class I’ve been learning about modulation. This is where the the key of a song is changed without actually altering the key signature (the prescribed amount of assumed flats or sharps that informs the musician of what key they are reading). Modulations are often achieved through the use of “closely related keys”, which in layman terms means two keys that sound good together. 

“It’s easy, for instance, to go from C to F. But there are some modulations that aren’t so easy. For instance, to go from F to F#, you’ve got to weave through all sorts of things.”

To the average person’s ear, a modulation is often unnoticeable. The change just happens. I’m just now beginning to learn how to perceive modulations in music I hear. It’s strange and wonderful how things that are so foreign and difficult for us at first can become easy and even rewarding in the long run. 

“And it seems to me if you’ve got someone to help you as you weave...maybe this is just too philosophical. Maybe I’m trying to combine things that can’t be combined, but it makes sense to me.”

A more simple musical idea is the “theme”. A theme is defined as “a prominent or frequently recurring melody or group of notes in a composition”. 

“It seems to me that there are different themes in life.”

Simple enough. The theme is a part of your life where things are secure or predictable. There’s a pattern. The modulations are the hiccups. The unexpected road bumps. The things we don’t like. But the funny thing about modulations is that the new chord that might not fit in the original key becomes the first chord of the new key at the same time. It was wrong, and now it’s right. 

Life is never this easy. And Mister Rogers understood this. But his illustrations were powerful, and always right on the nose. 
Last night I worked for hours on an assignment where I had to compose three different lines of music each with a different type of modulation. 
And tonight I turned on my tv and Mister Rogers told me about how music is kind of like life, and that I’ll get through it. 

“There’s so much to think about, isn’t there?”