Beginner Vocal Primer

100 Years of BroadwayLarimer Music Presents

The Larynx (voice box)

The Lungs and Diaphragm

Phonation & Resonation

Vocal RegistersChest voice

Lower rangeSpeaking voiceVibration feltIn chest

Vocal RegistersPharyngeal VoiceMiddle rangeNasally or twangy

Vocal RegistersHead voice

Upper rangeResonation in forehead and top of headOperatic Sound

Where and when was music notation created?Our western tradition of written music has been around for around 1500 years. A Roman poet and philosopher named Boethius wrote a famous Latin paper on music which was studied throughout the Middle Ages. In this paper was the first use of Latin letters to represent musical pitches. Monks in monasteries of the catholic church studied the paper by Boethius and improved on his ideas to create their own system. After a few hundred years, in addition to letter names for notes, a system of neumes were created. Neumes are signs written above the text of a song which show note length, pitch, and movement from one note to the next.

Gradually, the neumes began to be written above or below a single line. This line represented a specific pitch.

Guido di Arezzo, a Benedictine monk, is given credit for many innovations made to the early form of written music. Its believed that he increased the lines from one or two to four. He was responsible for the invention of the Guidonian Hand which he used to teach the other monks music. Each finger represented a line of the staff. This method is still used today.Most early examples of written music were church music as the monks were diligent about writing down music. There likely were pop tunes of the day, but they were not written down.

Monophonic music was mostly what was sung and written down in Guidos day. Mono means onetherefore monophonic music was one part only what we call today, unison. Eventually, the monks got bored with one part, and they began to add other parts which meant that they needed to add more lines to written music for the other parts. Thats when music expanded from two lines to 4 and then to 5 lines as we use now. Music with more than one part being sung at one time is called polyphonic music.

Modern Music Notation