Guide

What is music?•

Music is the art of combining sounds. The human being has been producing music as a mean of expression since thousands of years ago.From what we can tell, by the time the ancient world was beginning to establish itself — approximately 7000 B.C. — musical instruments had already achieved a complexity in design that would be carried all the way into the present.

• Bone flutes with five to eight drilled holes were being produced in the Henan Province in China that could play notes in both the five-note Xia Zhi scale and the seven-note Qing Shang scales of the ancient Chinese musical system. Some of the flutes found from this time period are still playable, and

• short performances have been recorded on them for modern listeners to hear.• All over the world, people were playing music — and not just on bone whistles

and empty turtle shells. Pictographs and funerary ornaments have shown that by 3500 B.C., Egyptians had invented the harp — or at least were using it a lot — as well as double-reed clarinets, lyres, and their own version of the flute. By 2500 B.C., their neighbors across the Mediterranean, the Cycladians, eventually responsible for forming Greek culture, had adopted the lyre as well, while in faraway Denmark, the Danes had invented the first known trumpet. By 1500 B.C., the Hittites of northern Syria had modified the traditional lute/harp design of the Egyptians and invented the first two-stringed guitar, with a long, fretted neck, tuning pegs at the top of the neck, and a hollow

• soundboard to amplify the sound of the strings being plucked. Guitars may look a lot cooler now and have a few more strings, but they follow the same basic design laid out more than 3,000 years ago.

• There are a lot of unanswered questions about ancient music, not the least being why so many different cultures came up with so many of the same tonal qualities in their music completely independent of one another. Many theorists have concluded that certain patterns of notes just sound right to listeners, and certain patterns don’t. Music theory, then, very simply, could besaid to be a search for how and why music sounds right or wrong.

• - Harmony: is the combination of sounds simultaneously - Rhythm: relations of duration and accentuation of sounds- Melody: is the combination of sounds in a succession.

Elements of Music

Staff or Stave

• The staff has 4 spaces and 5 lines, the symbols and signs of music are written in the staff. You start reading a staff from the bottom lines to the top lines

Clefs• The clefs name the notes accordingly to

their position in the staff and also the range of notes. There are seven musical clefs and they are written in the beginning of the staff.

G clef or treble

Scales

• In Western musical theory there are 12 keys. There are two kind of scales:

• - Chromatic- Diatonic: subdivided into major, minor. The minor keys subdivide again into: natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor

Notes• Notes are the symbols that represent sounds.

There are seven musical notes:

DO RE MI FA SOL LA SIC D E F G A B

Note were named by Guido d’Arezzo, an Italian monk and music theorist, he had the idea to name the notes after are the initial syllables of each of the first six half-lines of the first stanza of the hymn Ut queant laxis.

Note Values

Note values represent the duration of sounds.The rest is the symbol that represents a pause, the rest silences it correspondent note value.

Time Signature• In printed music, right after the clef at the beginning of the staff,

you’ll see a pair of numbers, one written over the other, these are called time signatures, the time signature is there to tell you two

• things:• _ Number of beats in each measure: The top number in the time

signature tells you the number of beats to be counted off in each measure. If the top number is three, then each measure contains three beats.

• _ Which note gets one beat: The bottom number in the time signature tells you which type of note value equals one beat — most often, eighth notes and quarter notes. If the bottom number is four, then a quarter note is one beat. If it’s an eight, then an eighth note gets one beat 2 3 44 4 4

Bars and Measures• A measure (sometimes called a bar) is any

segment of written music contained• within two vertical bars that span the staff from

top to bottom.• Measures follow one another throughout a piece

of written music, and each• one contains as many beats as is

indicated by the top number in the time signature.

Tempo

• Tempo means, quite basically, “time,” and when you hear people talk about the tempo of a musical piece, they are referring to the speed at which the music progresses. The point of tempo is not necessarily how fast or slowly you can play a musical piece, however. What tempo really does is set the basic mood of a piece of music. Music that is played very, very slowly, or grave, can impart a feeling of extreme somberness, whereas music played very, very quickly, or prestissimo, can seem maniacally happy and bright.

Tones and semitones

• The pitch of a note is how high or low it sounds. Musicians often find it useful to talk about how much higher or lower one note is than another. This distance between two pitches is called the interval between themIn Western notation, the smallest difference between two pitches is the semitoneA Whole Step is simply two semitones distance.

• Tones and semitones are intervals. There are also lots of other kinds of intervals.

Alterations

• SharpsA sharp is a symbol (♯, also ‘#’ in type) placed in front of a note, increasing its pitch by a half step or semitone. D# is a half step higher in pitch than D; and D is a half step higher than C#.

• FlatsA flat is a symbol ( , also ‘b’ in type) ♭placed in front of a note, decreasing its pitch by a half step or semitone; Db is a half step lower in pitch than D.

• Naturalsa natural is an accidental which cancels previous accidentals and represents the unaltered pitch of a note