This series is intended to be an introduction to how music is played, composed, and studied. We will start at the very beginning of the basics of music theory...
Music is nearly impossible to define, but it can be described as sounds, called notes, and silences, called rests. In Classical Music, these notes are written on a staff of five lines:
The squigly symbol at the left of the staff is called a "clef." This tells us which note on the staff is which pitch. The clef shown here, the Treble clef, is the most common clef. It tells us that any note placed on the second line of the staff (from the bottom) is a "G." The notes in Classical Music are A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. There are also notes in between some of these notes, but we will cover that later.
In addition to the notes in music, rhythm is very important. Rhythm tells us how long each note or rest should be held. How long a note is held is determined by the "beat" of the music. If you have ever tapped your foot to something that you have listened to, you have found the "beat." This next picture gives us some information about the rhythm:
The "Time Signature in this example is "4/4," which is pronounced "four four." To explain what the "Time Signature" means, we must look at each of the two fours separately. The upper four means there are four beats in a bar (or measure). The lower four means that each of the beats is what is called a "quarter note." Before we explain what a "quarter note" is, we will help you to understand a bar. If notes are like letters in a language, bars are like words. In languages such as English, words are separated by spaces (of course!). In music, words (called bars) are separated by barlines, or lines that vertically cross the staff. In this example, every bar will contain exactly four beats. As we explained, each beat we be represented by a "quarter note." In our example, here is how several different types of notes will fit in to a bar:
As you can see, only one whole note fits into one bar with a 4/4 time signature. Two half notes fit into the same bar, and so on. All of the names such as half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, (and ever thirty-second) are relative to the whole note. This meens that a sixteenth note is one sixteenth of a whole note, or 1/4th of a quarter note. It may all seem mathematical and complicated, but it gradually becomes very natural. The main thing to remember is that the whole measure must be complete, meaning every beat must be filled with either notes or rests. Speaking of rests, here is the series of rests, each corresponding in lenght to its respective note:
OK! Enough with the just the rhythm. Now we can get to the notes and eventually harmony. Keep reading on and we page and we will provide you with some audio/visual materials!
