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How To Read The Music: Right

A piece of written music tells a performer what notes to play and when to play them. Notes are represented by symbols on a staff, with their pitch indicated by their position on the lines and spaces and their duration indicated by note symbols like quarter notes and half notes. Additional elements like the time signature, clef, and bar lines provide further information on the rhythm.

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Marco Lenoci
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56 views3 pages

How To Read The Music: Right

A piece of written music tells a performer what notes to play and when to play them. Notes are represented by symbols on a staff, with their pitch indicated by their position on the lines and spaces and their duration indicated by note symbols like quarter notes and half notes. Additional elements like the time signature, clef, and bar lines provide further information on the rhythm.

Uploaded by

Marco Lenoci
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as ZIP, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How to read the music

When we watch a film or a play, we know that the actors probably learned their lines
from a script,which essentially tells them what to say and when to say it.
A piece of written music operates on exactly the same principle.
In a very basic sense, it tells a performer what to play and when to play it.
Aesthetically speaking, here’s a world of difference between, say, Beethoven and
Justin Bieber, but both artists have used the same building blocks to create their
music: NOTES.
And although the end result can sound quite complicated, the logic behind musical
notes is actually pretty straightforward.
Let’s take a look at the foundational elements to music notation and how they interact
to create a work of art.

Music is written on five parallel lines that go across the page. These five lines are
called a STAFF, and a staff operates on two axes: UP and DOWN and LEFT to
RIGHT.
The Up-and-Down axis tells the performer the PITCH of the note or what note to
play, and the Left-to-Right axis tells the performer the rhythm of the note or when to
play it.

Let’s start with Pitch.


To help us out, we’re going to use a piano, but this system works for pretty much any
instrument you can think of.
In the Western music tradition, pitches are named after the first seven letters of the
alphabet: A B C D E F G.
After that, the cycle repeats itself A B C D E F G A B C… and so on.

But how do these pitches get their names?

Well, for example , if you played an F and then played another F higher or lower on
the piano, you’d notice that they sound pretty similar compared to, say, a B .

Going back to the staff, every line and every space between two lines represents a
separate pitch.
If we put a note on one of these lines or one of these spaces, we’re telling a performer
to play that pitch.
The higher up on the staff a note is placed, the higher the pitch. But there are
obviously many , many more pitches than the nine that these lines and spaces gives
us.
A gran piano , for example, can play 88 separate notes.

So how do we condense 88 notes onto a single staff?

We use something called a CLEF a weird-looking figure placed at the


beginning of the staff, which acts like a reference point, telling you that particular line
or space corresponds to a specific note on your instrument.
If we want to play notes that aren’t on the staff, we kind of cheat and draw extra little
lines called Ledger Lines and place the notes on them.
If we have to draw so many Ledger Lines that it gets confusing, then we need to

change to a different clef.

As for telling a performer when to play the notes, two main elements control this: the
BEAT and the RHYTHM.

The beat of a piece of music is, by itself, kind of boring. It sounds like this.
(Metronome Sound)
Notice that it doesn’t change.
It can go slow or fast or whatever you like.
The point is that just like the second hand on a clock divides one minute into sixty
seconds, with each second just as long as every other second, the beat divides a piece
of music into little fragments of time that are all the same length: beats.
With a steady beat as a foundation, we can add rhythm to our pitches, and that’s when

music really starts to happen.

This is a Quarter Note. It’s the most basic unit of rhythm, and it’s
worth 1 beat.

This is a Half Note, and it’s worth 2 beats.

This Whole Note here is worth 4 beats,

and these are Eighth Notes, worth 1/2 beat each.

We can have noticed that across the length of a staff, there are little lines dividing it
into small sections.
There are BAR LINES and we refer to each section as a bar. At the beginning of a
piece of music, just after the Clef, is something called the Time Signature, which
tells a performer how many beats are in each bar.
This says there are two beats in each bar, this says there are three, this one four, and
so on. The bottom number tells us what kind of note is to be used as the basic unit for
the beat. One corresponds to a whole note, two to a half note four to a quarter note,
and eight to an eighth note , and so on.
So this time signature here tells us that there are four quarter notes in each bar.
If we just stick to the beat, it gets kind of boring, so we’ll replace some quarter notes
with different rhythms.

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