Introduction to Pitch Notation
Welcome to the beginning of our course of study. We start off by checking in on your knowledge of the Bass, Treble, Alto Clefs and your reading of the Grand Staff. Some of you perform on bass clef instruments, some of you on treble clef instruments. If you are a violist, you know the alto clef, and if you are a pianist you know the grand staff. If you are primarily a singer, you focus primarily on the bass or trebe clefs, though all choir members should know both clefs. Some of you have less background in pitch notation — non-classical guitarists on the whole are not very clear about how traditional notation applies to their instrument. Regardless of your backbround, all of you are going to have to quickly get comfortable with three clefs plus the grand staff. The next section helps you with this by pointing out a critical element that even the more experienced among you may not have noticed: the symmetry of much of our staff notation. Let's investigate this as the first step in this course.
The symmetry of pitch notation
Part of being a Western trained musician is learning the standard system of musical notation. The history of Western classical music is, in the end, a history of composers and their works. Composers are trained in the art of musical notation and they write down their musical thoughts for later performance. A composer thinks musical thoughts and writes down those thoughts just as a writer thinks in words and writes down those words. Musical literacy is a tool, only, not an end in itself and can sometimes become a hindrance to musical spontaneity – such as the pianist who can play Rachmaninoff but can’t, when asked at a party, produce “Happy Birthday” at the piano without sheet music. Some systems of music education, most notably the Suzuki method, teach music by ear until the child is well along in her musical development, based on the premise that we learn to speak before we learn to read and write, so we should learn to play before we learn to read music. It is likely some of you in the class have had this training.
Nevertheless, in order to play or sing in musical ensembles, which is of course one of the great joys of being a musician, or in order to share your musical thoughts with others, it is necessary to learn to become musically literate. One can, of course choose to remain exclusively in the world of folk or rock music, many of whose greatest writers (I think of Dylan or Lennon/McCartney) could not in fact read music. If that is your situation, and you don’t wish to move past the spontaneous, “ear-based” approach of rock or blues or folk performers, then you don’t really need this course! But I would interject that such musically illiterate success was partially based on such musicians being in the orbit of other individuals who were musically literate. The most well known example would be the producer George Martin, whose classical music background was of great help to the Beatles when they created their seminal studio recordings of the mid-1960s.
Becoming musically literate is a matter of mastering a common set of symbols and is, after all, not terribly difficult: a graph of five lines and four spaces, with ledger line extensions, upon which we place notes of a certain duration so that one’s musical thoughts can be shared with other musicians or remembered for one’s own use the next day. Tempo indications, some dynamic markings and score directions; there you have it: the world of notated music.
What is important for our work in this class is to realize how relative musical notation actually is, and how much it is not able to capture. Our rhythmic subdivisions rarely can capture the subtle shifts of a jazz improvisation, let alone most of the rest of the world’s music—notated transcriptions of, for example, Indian raga performances look stale on the page. Even in notated classical compositions, to simply play the notes steadily in time is to be labeled a wooden, unfeeling performer. And as far as notation is concerned, the notes today reflect a standard and rigid concept known as equal temperament, in which every step along a 12 note scale of half steps are exactly equal to one another in musical distance. Indeed, we have invented a term, the cent, to show that each note proceeds smoothly, 100 cents per note.
But, as we will explore in the later pages, equal temperament is not how we actually perform music, if we are to perform it well in tune. We continually adjust our singing and our finger movements to keep chords in tune, which involves adjusting especially the most movable notes, the thirds and sixths and harmonic extensions. These adjustments are never able to be reflected in musical notation. And just intonation, arguably the most natural and pleasing form of intonation, does not look any different on the page than equal temperament. We will explore this topic this fully in class.