// The
first entry in this series.
*As the class reassembles, the teacher walks in, favouring her right leg slightly. She settles herself in a seat by the piano, checks the bandage, and starts.*
Now pitch is nice, but that's not all
Duration also must be known;
You know where the pitches fall
But not how long to hold a tone.
So that's where we'll begin today
I'll bring new tricks to light -
So when a minstrel starts to play
Your music, he'll be right!
- - - - - -
*The jeans-and-t-shirt-clad doppelganger makes a reappearance, with a cast around her right leg*
Hi everyone! Sorry for the delay in today's lesson; the performance was excellent, and so ebullient was I that I decided to go out and have some fun, and some goblins took advantage of it. *she sighs* Ah well. We live and learn, and Ilsare is surely inclined to forgive a little frivolity.
So, last week we discussed notation of pitch. That's all well and good, of course, but it's only half the story. There also has to be a way of indicating precisely how long a tone should be held. In addition to this, we have to have a means of measuring silences as well. Happily, we have both!
First... *she gestures, and a glowing staff springs into existence in the air before her* we have this:
This is a whole note - so named because all the other note durations derive from it. It is the longest commonly-employed note duration. (Technically, there's a longer note called a
breve which is twice as long, but it is very seldom employed.) Now, you closet Aragenites are going to love this, because this is where music and math intertwine. The progression of durations is in powers of two. If we split this whole note into two tones *she pantomimes grabbing the illusory note and tearing it in two, and it obligingly reforms*
These are half notes. Each is half the duration of the whole note. Simple, no? And if we subdivide these further, we get quarter notes...
And eighth notes:
Now, we'll pause here. The eighth note, as you see, adds a beam to the quarter note. If we want sixteenth notes, we add a second beam. If we're notating thirty-second notes, we add a third. If we're writing sixty-fourth notes, we need a fourth beam and a bodyguard to protect us from angry instrumentalists. (If you're writing sixty-fourth notes, you probably want to reconsider your time signature - more on that later!) If an eighth note or smaller is present without a companion to which it can be beamed, it receives a "flag" instead, as you can see on this lone sixteenth note:
A brief note on note stems. The stem is the line that extends upwards or downwards from the filled or empty circle of the note. As a general rule, if the note is higher than the middle line of the staff, the stem goes down. If it's lower, the stem goes up. If it's
on the middle line, its direction is dependent on the direction of the other stems in the measure (that's the section of the staff between two vertical lines). It succumbs to peer pressure and directs its stem in the same fashion as the majority of stems in the bar. Similarly, if you have a collection of beamed notes, their collective stem direction is generally determined by which direction the majority would go on their own. The exception to this rule is if multiple voices are condensed onto a single staff - in which case, to avoid confusion, the upper voice has its stems going up, while the lower has its stems going down.
Now, this tells us how long notes are, but it doesn't tell us how long silences are (or give the singer any chance to breathe!) For that, we have
rests. Again, let's start with the
whole rest.
Again, if we seperate that into two distinct durations, we have the half rest:
Now, they look very similar - and they almost always fall in the same space, the third - but my instructor at the Bard academy gave me a simple mnemonic with which to remember which is which. The whole rest is strong, so it pulls itself up to the top of the space, as if it were doing chinups. The half rest is weaker, so it just sits at the bottom of the space. And that's how I remember!
If we subdivide still further, we have the quarter rest...
And the eighth rest:
.
And, as with the eighth note, after the eighth rest, you simply add flags for each successive subdivision, as denoted by this sixteenth rest:
Unlike notes, eighth and sixteenth (and so forth) rests do not have beams between them, because there's no distinction between two eighth rests in succession and a quarter rest. With notes, the tone can change; with rests, it's only silence.
"But Therise!", I hear you cry, "What if we want to have a tone that's three-quarters as long as a whole note? Or as long as a quarter note and a half?" Happily, we have notation for that as well - two types, in fact! The first is dotted and double-dotted notes:
A dotted note is held for a duration one and a half times that of the undotted note. A
double-dotted note is held for the note's duration, plus half of that, plus a quarter of that. These evolved as a sort of notational shorthand, to avoid excessive use of the
other method of increasing a tone's duration...
The tied note! A
tie is the curved line connecting the noteheads, and means that they are to be read as a single, uninterrupted note. This pair of notes, therefore, is equivalent to the dotted half note you saw a moment ago. With ties, therefore, we can use the various durations to construct any other possible duration. (Math!)
A final note before we finish up for today. At the beginning of a piece of music, shortly after the clef, you'll often see something that looks like this:
This is the
time signature, and it's really quite straightforward. The upper number signifies how many beats make up a measure, or "bar". (The single lines that demarcate the beginning and end of a bar are known, somewhat uncreatively, as "bar lines".) The lower number indicates which duration is assigned one "beat". So in the above example, there are four beats in a bar, and a quarter note gets one beat. A whole note, therefore, would take up an entire bar. Time signatures are read from top to bottom, so this time signature is often referred to as "four-four time". Other popular time signatures are "three-four", "two-four", "two-two", and "six-eight" - and I'll be happy to explain where and when they're employed after class.
Four-four is the most popular time signature however - so commonly employed that it was, in fact, designated as "common time", and its time signature can also be denoted thus:
Some clever person then decided that if you cut both 4's in half, you'd get two-two time. So they created
this notation...
...to use in place of two-two time, and called it "cut time". And now, students, we're
out of time! I'll be on IRC in #theory_threas!
*she waves and ducks out*
/ / / / /
You've got the pitches and the time
You've got the tools to write with now
But there are other tricks to writing
Keep coming back - I'll show you how!
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