Nickol - Learning To Read Music: How to make sense of those mysterious symbols and bring music alive

On a page of printed music, most of the symbols, and the way they are positioned, concern two things:

Pitch
High or low notes; whether a note is C, D, E or whatever

Duration
Whether notes are long or short; how they relate to each other in time

Well start in this chapter with pitch.

In music we talk of sounds being high or low meaning high-pitched or low-pitched. You probably know this instinctively, but high-pitched sounds are those made at the right-hand end of a piano keyboard, or by high-pitched instruments such as piccolo or descant recorder. Low-pitched sounds come from the left-hand end of the piano, or from instruments such as double-bass or tuba.

When music is written down, the stave (or staff) a set of five horizontal lines is a way of indicating high or low:

Notes can be positioned on the lines:

or in the spaces:

The five-line stave can be extended upwards or downwards by using ledger lines:

Notes can be put on or between the ledger lines:

These two notes are very close together but the black note is a little higher than the white note:

These two are further apart:

and these two are still further apart:

but in each case the black note is the higher one.

But what notes are they, those notes? What are they called? We dont know. We only know how far apart they are, relative to each other.

In order to give the notes a more fixed identity, we must attach a clef to the stave.

There are other clefs, but those two are by far the most commonly used.

When we put a clef on a stave, it has the effect of fixing or identifying the pitch of the lines and spaces. For instance, if we put a treble clef on a stave, like this:

we can then put a name to each note each line and each space. The bottom line, for instance, is E:

And these are F and G:

More precisely still, we can call the bottom line the E above middle C, to distinguish it from other Es. Middle C itself is written on the first ledger line below the stave:

Putting a bass clef on the stave also fixes the pitches of the lines and spaces, but at a different, lower pitch range. The top line, for instance, is A A below middle C: