Musical Structure and Notation

Music has to reach high and low, just as human live ascends to enormous achievement and descends to utter despair.

The distance between the two is known as the range, and because of the way they're constructed, each musical instrument has a different one.

The Pitch of a note is the exact degree of how high or low the note is. Composers have to write down the exact pitch of a note so that performers can reproduce it later.

We've already established that a high pitch is produced by fast, frequent sound waves. And a lower pitch is produced by a slow frequency. If you ever get a chance to see an oscilloscope (a machine that monitors sound waves and displays their shape visually), you'll be able to see this for yourself; it'll look just like the waves of the sea.

Keys and Harmony

In Western music there are seven main steps (notes) in the scale. if we add an eighth, then we have an octave. Now here's an amazing thing. The higher note is exactly double the lower note in frequency, so it sounds the same except higher.

Three or more notes struck together make a chord. Chords can be in harmony, but they can also be dissonant; because dissonant chords create less regular vibrations in the sound waves, they are more uncomfortable to listen to. Harmonic chords, however, are much more acceptable to our ears, although if there are no dissonances at all, then the music can become boring.

The musical key is a bit like the key you use to get into a house! It's basically a point of entry; a starting point for a musical scale. If the piece of music you're playing is in the key of C, then the basic scale of seven notes (CDEFGABC) on which the music is based begins and ends on C.

When a piece is written in a key, then the whole thing will somehow relate to that note and its octave (8 notes above/below). Keys exist in both major and minor version, each of which sounds very distinct. These versions are created by either raising notes with sharps, or lowering them with flats.

Rhythm

Music always takes place in time. Therefore, we need to know in what order to play the notes, and how long to play them for. Notes are grouped into bars (or measures in American English) and there are several symbols that need to be known to fully understand the score.

In order to make all these hieroglyphic-like symbols comprehensible, five parallel lines - known as a stave - are drawn across each page. The notes are written on the stave in the order in which they should be played. There are enough lines on the stave to show at least one octave of notes, and should a wider range be required, then you can add other little lines, called ledger lines, above and below the stave. Therefore, we can also show which octave notes need to be played in.

The bars are marked out on the stave by vertical lines. The space between two vertical lines is said to be a bar. At the beginning of the stave, there's always a time signature which shows how many beats there are in a bar.

Notes are written as little blobs on or between the lines of the stave. We can tell how long a note needs to be played for from its shape. For instance, a minum (half note) would be written as a blob with a white centre and a stalk, whereas a quaver (eighth note) would be written as a blob with a filled-in centre and a stalk with a single tail.

Performers can used all the techniques and ideas discussed above in order to create an infinite number of effects. For instance, if there is a key change or some other modulation in the music, the performer might decide to lengthen or shorten or accentuate a particular note or phrase etc.

Even when we are not actively aware of how a performer is manipulating these techniques to create a musical effect, we can still appreciate it - however complicated it might be - because of the way in which it affects us emotionally.

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