Download Theory Exercise 1.1

Theory Exercise 1.1
Music is made from the interactions of various individual notes. In order to understand
what is happening in a piece of music and to participate in that process it is important
(but not always necessary) to interpret a symbolic language used by composers and
performers which we call music notation. Gaining fluency in this act of recognition and
interpretation is what we call reading music.
The first step in this process is learning to recognize and interpret three different types of
musical symbols:
 The Musical Staff
 Clefs
 Noteheads
The Musical Staff:
The musical staff is a set of 5 horizontal lines which, when blank, looks like this:
The staff is essentially a plane where graphic elements provide instructions to the
performer. If you can read a line graph you can read music. In this case, the horizontal
lines (the x-axis, so to speak) give information about when notes occur in time and in
relationship to one another. We will look into this further in a later lesson. If one travels
vertically across the staff (the y-axis), like the Frog in the old videogame Frogger, one
passes through a pattern of a horizontal line followed by a space followed by a line
followed by a space, etc. This series of lines and spaces provides information about the
pitch of a given note.
We should briefly discuss the definition of a pitch. For our purposes it will suffice to say
that a pitch is a specific vibrating speed of the cello string. A comprehensive answer is
much more detailed than this and requires some significant understanding of physics. To
give a name to every possible vibration would be impossible; fortunately, the system
which makes sense for music is quite simple.
Every time a given vibration is doubled (that is, when a string vibrating at 220 hertz
vibrates at 440 hertz) the sound that is produced is the same, only twice as high. When
this happens we say that the higher vibrating pitch is an octave higher than the lower.
Therefore, if we assign the letter A to signify the pitch at 220 hertz we can also use the
same letter A to mean the pitch at 440 hertz and then at 880 hertz and so forth. We will
see later how the musical staff and clefs help us to know which of these A’s we should
play.
In standard musical notation, we organize the space within this octave into 12 equal
divisions. Technically, these divisions are not purely equal but for our purposes at this
stage we will act as if they are. The names of these divisions, which we will now refer to
as notes, are as follows:
A A# (or Bb) B C C# (or Db) D D# (or Eb) E F F# (or Gb) G G# (or Ab) A
This may seem like a very confusing series of letters and symbols so we will simplify
things for the time being by removing those letters which have a ‘#’ or ‘b’ attached to
them. We are left with this:
A B C D E F G A
These are all of the “natural” notes. On a piano keyboard, these notes are the white keys.
Let’s go one step further and rearrange these notes so the list begins with C:
C D E F G A B C
This is the most basic configuration of pitches in the musical language. Now we are
ready to locate these pitches on the musical staff.
Clefs:
As mentioned previously, the lines and spaces on the staff represent specific pitches. We
now know the names of the all the natural notes, but how do we know which line or
space corresponds to which of these notes?
A clef is a graphical symbol placed at the beginning of the staff which indicates which
line or space represents C or some other pitch; from there, any other note can be
determined. In cello playing the most common clef is called the bass or ‘F’ clef which
looks like this:
The two dots tell us that the horizontal line in between them is the pitch F. The natural
notes simply go in order by space and line from this point. As one travels up from F the
notes get higher, so F proceeds to G (in the space above) and then begins again at A (the
next line). As one travels down from F the notes get lower, so F proceeds to E (the space
below), then to D (the next line down), and so forth.
Noteheads:
Now that we know which notes correspond to which line or space we need a way to
signal the performer to play that specific note. This is done by placing a notehead on
either a line or a space. There are many different types of noteheads which primarily tell
us the duration of that note. For our purposes now we will only be using what is called a
whole note, which looks like this:
Since we know that on the bass clef the two dots tell us that the second line from the top
is an F, we now can interpret that this graphic symbol means to play an F at a specific
location. We haven’t yet determined which octave of F this refers to but we will get to
that later.
Now we will place all the natural notes, starting at C, on the bass clef to see what it looks
like. You will notice that when notes go beyond than the highest line on the staff, short
lines are added above to tell us whether we are on a space or a line (the same principle
applies when going beyond the lowest line). In some sense the staff goes on forever but
if we kept extending the horizontal lines above and below it would be inefficient. These
short lines added above or below are called ledger lines. Here are all the natural notes in
one octave from C to C on the bass clef:
C
D
E
F
G
A
B
C
We now have the knowledge necessary to figure out the name of any pitch represented on
the musical staff as long as we know how to interpret the given clef. See Worksheet 1.1
for some exercises to help practice this.