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    How to Read Music
    How to Read Music
    How to Read Music
    Ebook149 pages2 hours

    How to Read Music

    By Mark Phillips

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    About this ebook

    (Music Instruction). Music notation is a language that has been developing for thousands of years; even the manner in which we read music today has been around for several centuries. In learning to read music, we encounter basic symbols for pitch, duration, and timing. As we advance, we learn about dynamics, expression, timbre, and even special effects. How to Read Music will introduce you to the basics, then provide more advanced information. As a final reward for all your hard work, you'll get a chance to play excerpts from three classic piano pieces. Topics include: pitch * rhythm * meter * special words and symbols * plus classical piano pieces by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHal Leonard LLC
    Release dateDec 1, 2014
    ISBN9781495015359
    How to Read Music
    Author

    Mark Phillips

    Mark Phillips is the author of My Father's Cabin, and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Saturday Review, and Country Life. He has also worked as a beekeeper and occasional maple syrup producer in upstate New York.

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      Book preview

      How to Read Music - Mark Phillips

      ISBN 978-1-4950-0875-7

      7777 W. Bluemound Rd.  P.O. Box 13819  Milwaukee, WI 53213

      Copyright © 2015 by HAL LEONARD CORPORATION

      International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved

      In Australia Contact:

      Hal Leonard Australia Pty. Ltd.

      4 Lentara Court

      Cheltenham, Victoria, 3192 Australia

      Email: ausadmin@halleonard.com.au

      No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by

      any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

      For all works contained herein:

      Unauthorized copying, arranging, adapting, recording, Internet posting,

      public performance, or other distribution of the printed music

      in this publication is an infringement of copyright.

      Infringers are liable under the law.

      Visit Hal Leonard Online at

      www.halleonard.com

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1: Before You Start

      Chapter 2: About Pitch, Part 1

      Chapter 3: About Rhythm, Part 1

      Chapter 4: About Pitch, Part 2

      Chapter 5: About Rhythm, Part 2

      Chapter 6: About Meter

      Chapter 7: Special Words and Symbols

      Chapter 8: Three Classics for You to Play

      About the Author

      Chapter 1

      Before You Start

      What Is Music Reading?

      When you read music, you decipher information conveyed by symbols called notes that appear on a five-line grid called a staff. Then you use that information to play the music on your instrument, or just to hear it in your mind if you’re a super-advanced musician like Bach or Mozart!

      This is what notes look like. Notice that they come in various shapes:

      This is what a staff looks like:

      Some REAl Music

      This is what notes look like on a staff:

      So far, things are pretty simple. In the Three Blind Mice example above, the music is written for a singer; you know this because lyrics appear beneath the notes. But you, whether a singer or not, can glean some important information about reading music from this short example.

      What’s important to realize is that a note on a staff gives you two pieces of information at the same time.

      It tells you the note’s pitch (how high or low the note is). Notes get higher in pitch as they move higher on the staff and lower in pitch as they move lower on the staff.

      It tells you the note’s duration (how long it is to be held). The different shapes of the notes signify whether they are long notes or short notes or somewhere in between.

      In Three Blind Mice, because the notes are all the same shape, they are held for the same amount of time. Mentally, or out loud if you wish, sing the lyrics Three blind mice… and notice that each word is held for one unit of time and that those units are of equal duration. If you understand all this, you’re already reading music. Congratulations!

      Reading Music in Theory vs.

      Reading Music in Practice

      If you wanted to learn how to swim, you probably wouldn’t do very well just by reading a book about it. You’d have to get in the water and move your arms and legs and practice for quite a while. It’s pretty much the same thing with reading music. If you only read about it, without doing it on an instrument, you won’t get very far. That’s because in order to read music fluently, you have to understand at a glance the information the notes give about their pitch and duration.

      Think about reading text. When you see a word, any word, you know instantly what it is. If you had to sound it out letter by letter, as a first grader might do, you would be a very slow reader. It’s the same thing with reading music. You need to understand three things instantly when you look at music:

      How high or low the notes are, based on their position on the staff.

      How long or short the notes are, based on their shapes.

      Where to find those notes, or how to finger them, on an instrument.

      About the Piano Keyboard

      When most beginners start learning music—whether it’s to play an instrument, or to learn about music theory, or to learn how to read music—they use the piano keyboard as a starting point. That’s because (1) it’s visually conducive; you can see all the notes at once and (2) it’s easy to play because, as J. S. Bach once pointed out about keyboard instruments, all you have to do is hit the right note at the right time and the instrument plays itself!

      So, rather than simply read about how to read music, you should play all the examples in this book on a piano keyboard, either acoustic or electric. If you don’t own one, you should borrow one or buy one. New electronic keyboards can be found for less than $50. However, because this isn’t a book about how to play the piano, per se, we won’t dwell on fingering and technique and so on. We’ll give you just the information you need to play the examples on the instrument.

      Chapter 2

      ABOUT PITCH, PART 1

      More About the Staff

      The five lines of the staff are numbered from 1–5, with the bottom one called the first line and the top one called the fifth line:

      The staff consists not only of its five lines but also of the four spaces between the lines. These are numbered from 1–4, with the bottom one called the first space and the top one called the fourth space:

      More About the Pitches of Notes

      Every note has a letter name, depending on where it falls on the staff; that is, which line it sits on or which space it sits in. Only the first seven letters of the alphabet—A, B, C, D, E, F, G—are used in naming notes, with each letter higher in pitch than the letter that precedes it. So, if you move from A to B to C, you are moving higher in pitch, and the notes move higher on the staff. Conversely, if you move from C to B to A, you are moving lower in pitch and the notes move lower on the staff.

      What if you want to play the next note higher than G? Think about the numbers on the face of a clock. If you start at 1 and go to 12 and then continue, you come to 1 again. The same principle applies to the musical letter names. After G, you come to A again. So, a longer series of ascending notes might look like this: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C…

      Moving in a downward direction, the next note below A is G again. So, a long series of descending notes might look like this: G, F, E, D, C, B, A, G, F, E, D, C, B, A, G, F, E…

      Of course, it’s not enough to simply recognize the letter names of notes by their position on the staff. You also need to know (pretty much instantly) where to find them on an instrument—on a piano keyboard for the purposes of this book. And that comes from practice, some hands-on doing!

      More About the Shapes of Notes

      If the letter names tell you the pitches of the notes and you know where to find those pitches/letters on the piano keyboard, why doesn’t written music consist of just letter names? Well, some people do notate very simple music with letter names. But letter names don’t give you any information about rhythm; they don’t tell you how long to hold the notes. That’s where the different shapes of notes come in.

      You may know that all notes have a rounded portion—called the note’s head—that sits on a line or in a space, but sometimes the head is hollow and sometimes solid; and usually there are vertical lines (called stems) connected to the note head, and sometimes there are little doohickeys (called flags and beams) attached to the stems. Each particular variation signifies a certain type of note, with names like whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, and 16th note. And, as your inner mathematician can imagine, a whole note lasts (is held, or sustained) twice as long as a half note, which lasts twice as long as a quarter note, which lasts twice as long as an eighth note, which lasts twice as long as a 16th note. Sometimes you may even see a very short note called a 32nd note, which lasts half as long as a 16th note. But more on rhythm later; for now, we’re concentrating on pitch.

      Everything Is Relative: About Clefs

      A staff by itself has no real meaning until you know which lines and spaces signify which letters. The tricky part is that some instruments (for example, the piano, the organ, and the harp) generally use more than one staff for their written music, one staff for high notes, played by the right hand, and another for low notes, played by the left hand. And the letter names indicated by the staff lines and spaces for the right hand staff are different from those indicated by the left hand staff. So, how do you know which lines indicate which letters?

      A symbol called a clef is written at the beginning (the left edge—because music is read from left to right) of the staff, and the clef indicates that a certain staff line represent a certain letter. The clef used by the right hand of the piano (and for a lot of other instruments, such as flute, violin, and guitar) is called the G clef, or the treble clef. It’s called the G clef because the clef itself looks a

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