Nicolas Carter - How To Read Music: For Beginners - A Simple and Effective Guide to Understanding and Reading Music with Ease

What we call Common notation is, compared to the long history of musical sounds, a relative newborn. It was not the first form of musical notation and musical notation was not born as early as the earliest music. However, when you look at a sheet of music, you are looking at more than notes on a page you are looking at a history. There is a genealogy to every piece of music that has been written down that transcends the specific history that pieces creation. Each time someone transcribes or composes a piece of music using the western traditions common notation practices, they recall the historyfrom Bach to Schoenberg to Coltranethat preceded that notation. The history of the music is in part the history of its being written down, and the writing of the thing bears on its content in some important ways. There is no way to understand modern music theory without also understanding modern musical notation, no way to make sense of a pieces formal structure in any of the standard ways without also making sense of that piece on the page.

Common notation is how we speak to one another, it is how we learn music, how we share it, how we analyze and understand it, and, just as importantly, it is how we teach it. It may not be necessary for every practicing musician to read music as a second language, but it is absolutely essential to the professional practice of being a musician that they understand how common notation works, how a piece of written music is constructed, how they can learn about that music by reading it on the page, and how they can write their own music on the page in order to share it.

This guide is meant to instruct the uninitiated in the ways and methods of common musical notation. It is specifically a book about common notation (and tablature explanation) not about chord analysis, Nashville notation, or any other ways of communicating music. The goal of this book is:

• To help youthe reader who has little or no knowledge of what a piece of sheet music does and saysunderstand how that sheet works.

• To get you to experience and practice sightreading (the act of reading and directly performing a piece of music written down on a music sheet using common notation).

• The final aim is, while perhaps not fluency of the sort that those musicians who have studied common notation for decades posses, at least a sense of understanding that will help you as you move forward as a musician.

Music is part raw sensation and part linguistic phenomenon, and like all languages it has rules formal and otherwise for communication. The field of musical notation is populated by linguistic objects that conform to these rules, and understanding what those objects are, what they mean, and how they work (what rules they follow) will help you in a number of likely unforeseen ways.