Music notation is a language that allows us to represent variations in pitch over time. Rather than talk about it in abstract terms, let's start right away with an example. Here's a little tune; Richard Rodger's waltz from Carousel -- the opening phrase. Click on the green clef/play icon if you'd like to hear it.
To talk about this music notation we need names for the various parts. Here's a table with all the individual parts separated and named:
The five line staff carries the pitch and time notation. Pitch? Play the waltz above and listen to the piano play the melody. The melody is a collection of different pitches strung out in a sequence. Pitch is really steady vibration producing a sound. Faster vibration produces higher pitches and vice versa. The staff alone is not enough to determine pitch. The clef works with the staff to set the pitch. We use three different clefs in music. Two of them are shown in the table above. (Do a Google search on "tenor clef" and you can see the third one.) The treble or G clef in the waltz above tells us that a note placed on the staff's second line from the bottom is the pitch "G."
If you look with some imagination you can see that the treble clef is a fancy letter G. The bass or F clef in the waltz above tells us that a note placed on the staff's second line from the top is the pitch "F." (A tenor clef positions the pitch "C" for us on the staff.)
Once you know the position of "g," "f" or "c" you can determine the name of any other note on the staff. The notes are named for the first seven letters of the alphabet (a through g). Each space and line on the staff gets a letter name once the cleff is in place. Notes move up the staff in sequence stepping from line to space to line, etc. Therefore a note on the second space from the bottom of a trebble (G clef) staff is the note "a." The bottom space is "f" and the bottom line is "e." The space bellow the bottom line is "d" and the space above the top line is "g." On a bass (F clef) staff the top space is "g" and the middle line is "d." Take some time and count through both the trebble and bass staffs naming the letter values for the lines and spaces. Draw a staff and write in the clefs and letter names. We're going to talk about pitch in more detail later.
Now look at the notes in the table. There are three. Each note has a body and a stem. Look at the body of the half note; it's open. Each note does two jobs. It identifies the pitch by it's position on the staff and it identifies the length of time that pitch is played. A whole note (not shown) has an open body and no stem. A half note is held half as long as a whole note. A quarter note is held half as long as a half note or one quarter as long as a whole note. Got it? The eighth note has a flag on it's stem. A note with two flags is a sixteenth note. Three flags makes a thirty second note and so forth. This is the time aspect of music -- variations in pitch over time. Look at the waltz again and you'll see some eighth notes with their stems joined together. This is common -- think of it as shorthand. Again in the waltz you'll see both quarter and half notes with dots behind them. Dotted notes are half again as long. In other words a dotted half note is as long as three quarter notes while a dotted quarter note is as long as three eighth notes.
There is a half rest shown in the table.
In the waltz above there are two half rests in the first measure. Rests identify the time during the music when there is silence. Rests have values equivalent to the values of notes. We often need to know how long to wait between sequences of notes. Here are the common rests, in order left to right they are whole, half, quarter, eighth and sixteenth.
There are two more time related elements in the above table. They are the measure bar and the time signature. The measure bar identifies units of like time. The time signature looks like a fraction; one number over another.
The top number indicates the number of beats in each measure while the bottom number indicates the length of each beat expressed as a note value. We would read the time signature of the waltz above as "three beats to a measure, quarter note gets one beat." If the time signature were 2 over 2 we would read it as, "two beats to a measure, half note gets one beat." Beat? Music, like Gene Kelly, has rhythm. More than anything else music is associated with dance. The most common forms of music are dances -- the waltz presented here, a tango, a polka, The Boogie Woogie, hip hop. The beat in music is one of the things an orchestra conductor controls. She stands where all the players can see her and keeps time so everyone plays together. Play the waltz above and count the beats as it plays. There are three beats in each measure so we count: one two three, one two three, one two three. Notice your natural tendancy to stress the first beat. We call that the down beat. You're learning the defining characteristics of a waltz -- a dance in three quarter time with strong emphasis on the down beat.
Now it's time to do some math -- just a little. In music notation, all the notes in a measure must add up to agree with the time signature. If the time signature says there are three beats in a measure and a quarter note gets one beat, then each measure must contain no more and no less than the equivalent of three quarter notes. Look at the third measure of the waltz. There are four notes in the melody. Three of the notes are eighth notes and the fourth is a dotted quarter note. Any combination of notes is OK as long as the total measure count is correct. The third measure of the bass staff has only one note. A dotted half note is equivalent to three quarter notes. If that note were only a half note then a quarter rest would be required to complete the measure.
The final element in the above table that we need to talk about is the key signature. For this topic we'll need a new chapter.