Lesson 6 – Basic Music Notation – Part 1

How to read and interpret music?

Can I learn to play an instrument without reading music?

That’s a question I get quite often from my students and from people who want to become musicians. The answer to this question is fairly simple. Yes, absolutely. You can become a musician without being able to read music! Music is pretty much a language and you can still speak the language without being able to read it. Proof of that are many famous musicians who don’t read music and still they are great and successful. However, I believe all of them would have felt restricted at times by their inability to read music. Which naturally brings me to the next question.

Should you learn how to read music?

The answer to this question is also simple. Yes! I believe you should. Here are five reasons why you should do that:

1. Learning how to read music is the key to understanding music.
2. It makes it much easier and faster to learn music.
3. Helps you understand Music Theory and that’s quite an important aspect in music.
4. It makes technical aspects about the instrument much easier to explain and understand.
5. It makes everything much more fun. (It’s a bit slow and painful to start with but it gets quicker and easier with experience)

This course doesn’t only aim to teach how to play a few melodies. It’s meant to teach you how to understand music and apply it on the kaval. It teaches you how to apply that knowledge and continue your musical journey after the course is over. The easiest and the fastest way to do that is by learning how to read music. I highly recommend that you spend enough time on this lesson, as it’s going give the basics of how to read music and that is a skill you will need to understand the rest of the course.

Basic Notation Symbols

This and the next lesson cover information related to reading music for kaval and higher pitch instruments that use only the G Clef such as a flute, violin, saxophone etc.. In music notation there are two dimensions.

The vertical dimension records pitch and the horizontal dimension records rhythm. Basically, pitch means which notes to play and rhythm – when to play them. It’s a lot of information to fit in two lessons, but I’ll do my best. Of course, you can always come back to these lessons and review the information.

The Staff

The musical notes are organised on a five line classification system, called Staff. In between the 5 lines are 4 spaces. A note can be placed on either a line or a space on the staff, which means that each line or space represents a different note. 

Basically the higher the line or the space on the staff – the higher note it represents; the lower the line or the space on the staff – the lower note it represents. Those notes coincide with the letters of the alphabet from A to G. After G they start over from A again. They are also known as: C – Do, D – Re, E – Mi, F – Fa, G – Sol, A – La, B – Si

G Clef – 𝄞 (Treble Clef)

First let’s start with why it’s called the G Clef. The reason for this is that it encircles the G Line on the staff and shows where the note G is located. There are other clefs, as well, but they are beyond the scope of this lesson. Let’s take a look at the illustration on the right. It shows what note each line or a space represents. 

The first line at the bottom represents the note – E. Just above it, at the space between the bottom two lines is F. Then as we go up – G, A, B, C and D. You probably notice that there’s another E on the topmost space. This E is an octave apart from the one below. Meaning that it is an identical note but at a higher pitch. 

Notes

There are three parts of each note – Note Head, Stem and  Flag.

The Note Head can be either Black (Filled) or White (Open). It determines the duration of the note. The position of the note head on the staff – vertically, determines which note should be played.

The Stem is a thin vertical line emerging up from the right side or down from the left side of the note head. The direction of the stem doesn’t affect the way the note is played. It just makes notes easier to read while allowing them to fit on the staff neatly. Notes at or above the middle line (The B Line) on the staff have their stems pointing downwards, notes below the middle line have their stems pointing upwards.

The Note Flag is a curvy mark to the right of the note stem. Along with the note nead, it determines the duration of the note.

Ledger Line

To take full advantage of our instrument sometimes we need to play notes higher or lower than what can be notated on the staff. In that case lines, known as Ledger Lines, serve as an extension to the range of the staff they can go through, above or below a note head.

The easiest way to understand them is by imagining that the staff keeps going and we keep reading the notes up or down respectively. Here’s an example using ledger lines. I also added note names in the note head to simplify things. Memorizing all those notes takes time but you can always count them up or down from the last note on the staff.

Middle C (C4) and why is it so important?

You probably noticed that the diagram above starts with C4 (Middle C). Middle C is written on the first ledger line below the staff and serves as a reference point. For instance, if we say the E above Middle C every musician would know which E we’re referring to and that would be E4, the one located on the bottom line of the staff.

Accidentals

The accidentals are symbols that indicate an alteration of a note either by sharpening or flattening.

There are five accidental symbols in total:

1. Sharp (♯) raises the note by a semitone
2. Flat (♭) lowers the note by a semitone.
3. Natural (♮) restores the original pitch.
4. Double Sharp (×) – raises the note by two semitones or a whole step
5. Double Flat 𝄫 (♭♭) – lowers the note by two semitones or a whole step

There are two main ways of writing accidentals.

1. In front of a note – Just like in the example above.
   
2. Key Signature – The basic idea here is to place a symbol at the beginning of a staff. That indicates that the notes they refer to should always be altered by the accidentals written in the beginning of the staff unless specified otherwise.