THE WORLD OF PITCH

OK. You are finally learning to read music. Why you waited this long nobody knows. Maybe you thought it would be hard to do. Well, you are about to discover that it is not. There are two elemental aspects to music notation -- pitch and rhythm. Pitch refers to the tones we make with our voice or an instrument. When the sound vibrates at a steady rate it produces what we call tones. We write these tones on what we call a staff -- five lines and the four spaces between them. When sounds seems to go up, they go up the page and vice versa. The music you see below begins with that fancy squiggle we call a treble clef. it is used for all the music on the right side of the keyboard. it is also call a G clef because it tells us where to find the not G -- on the second line from the bottom. Lucky for you the musical alphabet only goes from A to G.

For demonstration purposes I have written the names of the notes for you in the first half of this piece. You job is to write the names in the second half. You will notice the notes can go above or below the staff. If we need to, we can add what are called leger lines for notes like B in measure 7.

Play these notes on your keyboard. It should not be too hard as they are almost all white notes. The black notes between them are called flats and sharps. If you go up from F to G (see m.11) the black note between them is called F sharp (). If you go down from G to F (see m. 15) the black note between them is called G flat ()