Music Notation Basics Part I - Notes and the Musical Staff
(26 Jun 04)
Putting Notes on Paper
Imagine trying to tell another musician what your music sounds like without actually playing the music. Imagine that you have spent many weeks or months composing a piece of music and want to be able to play it again decades later, or would like it to be played long after you've passed away. Being able to write down a set of instructions for playing your music would be important. It was especially important throughout history, when there was no way to record the music itself. How to start?
You need to describe many things about your music to help ensure other musicians perform it the way you intend. Some basic things would be note names or something to describe the pitch of the notes, the duration of the notes and how fast it should be played, or its tempo.
But this would hardly be enough. You might want to specify loudness, changes in loudness, how to transition between notes (abruptly or smoothly for example), and when to be silent and for how long. Everything that makes your music unique will have to be written down. It should be compact so performers can read it quickly—while playing, if needed.
I'll cover just one thing at a time—how to describe the pitch of the notes to be played. An example problem: how do you tell another musician to play the seven natural notes A, B, C, D, E, F, and G?. Seems simple enough—just write down the note names. Done!
It's not that simple. There are eight 'B' keys on a big piano keyboard. If I simply wrote 'B' on my sheet music, how would the pianist know which key to use? Of course guitarists have a similar (or worse) situation—as you can see on the fretboard below, where I've highlighted just some of the places on the fretboard where you can play a B. We need a way to distinguish between one B and all the others—some are high-pitched, some are low-pitched.
The sense that some notes are 'higher' or 'lower' than others led to a graphical way to write notes on paper that positions notes higher or lower than others to indicate pitch using what is called the staff.
The staff shown below is the grand staff, and looks like a section of graph paper without the vertical lines. It is like a graph because it uses physical position to show how notes relate to one other—composers write lower-pitched notes toward the bottom of the staff, and higher-pitched ones toward the top.
I mentioned earlier that the C key near the center of a keyboard plays the note called middle C. The line at the center of the grand staff represents Middle C.
We don't use the musical staff as drawn above—that many lines all drawn together are hard to read. I just wanted to show where things come from and how they fit together.
We now write the Grand Staff as two separate, smaller staffs (or staves) as shown below. The line that represents middle C has disappeared, so that each new staff has only five lines and four spaces.
You can imagine middle C being just below the upper section of the staff, or just above the lower section. It can actually appear in both places. When music requires the middle C note, the writer adds a short line, called a leger line, just for that note. Two short leger lines are shown below with the labels 'middle C' to the left of the staff.
You may want to look at some printed music (especially for keyboard) and notice how it is written on sections of grand staff that look like the drawing above.
The notes written on the lower staff are notes that are lower than middle C, and the notes written on the upper staff are notes that are higher than middle C. Musical notes are placed on the lines of the staff, and in the spaces between the lines. Each line corresponds to a specific note name, as does each space. The two staves that make up the Grand Staff are shown below, with all the lines and the spaces between them labeled with the names of corresponding notes.
Since the middle C key is near the middle of the keyboard, a pianist can use the left hand to play the lower-staff notes, and the right-hand to play the upper staff notes. So, this way of showing where notes are musically also relates to where they are physically—at least for the keyboard player.
The upper and lower halves of the grand staff can be used separately, one without the other. If I only write down one of them though, you have no way to know which one I meant to use.
So, each of them has a special symbol and related name so they can never be mixed up. For the upper staff, the symbol is called the treble clef, and for the lower staff, the symbol is called the bass clef. The symbols are shown below as they would be written on the grand staff, and again as they would each appear separately.
The word 'clef' means 'key' or 'indicator', and indicates which half of the Grand Staff is being used. The treble clef symbol is actually a highly stylized letter G, if you imagine a handwritten, fancy script G. In fact, the symbol circles around the line of the staff that will be used for the note G. The treble clef is also called the G clef.
The bass clef symbol also has its history in a letter—the letter F. Imagine the two dots to be all that is left of the two horizontal lines of a capital F. The two dots lie on each side of the staff line used for the note F. The bass clef is also called the F clef.
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