Music Theory Articles

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-14-2022

If you're trying to learn how to play music, read music, or brush up on improvising and performing with other musicians, music theory is important. However, you don't need to know every last tidbit that the many theorists around the world have written down. You just need to become familiar with some of the basics. You need to know the names of the musical notes, and you must understand time signatures, music intervals, and chord progressions.

Article / Updated 10-13-2019

Discussing form when talking about popular music is tricky because the term is often misused. Think of form as being the specific way a piece of music is constructed, with governing rules to that type of music’s construction. Genre, on the other hand, refers to a song’s style, such as the instrumentation used, overall tone of the music, and so on. However, some popular modern genres of music have been around long enough that specific patterns can be seen in their overall construction. These genres are Blues Folk/rock/pop Pop Jazz Feeling the Blues The blues is the first truly American folk music (aside from the unique music that the Native Americans had before the European invasion). The structure of the blues is the common ancestor of pretty much all other constructions of American popular music and has been influential around the world. Around the turn of the 20th century, field holler, church music, and African percussion had all melded into what is now known as the blues. By 1910, the word blues to describe this music was in widespread use. Blues music uses song, or ternary, form in three parts that follows an AABA pattern of I, IV, and V chords in a given scale. The B section is the bridge, a contrasting section that prepares the listener or performer for the return of the original A section. (Plenty of people complain that rock music uses only three chords: the I, IV, and V chords. Well, that all started with the blues!) The blues is almost always played in 4/4 time, with the rhythm beat out either in regular quarter notes or in eighth notes and with strong accents given on both the first and third beats of each measure. The most common types of blues songs are the 12-bar blues, the 8-bar blues, the 16-bar blues, the 24-bar blues, and the 32-bar blues. The “bar” refers to how many measures are used in each style of blues. If you’re in a bluesy mood, check out the following sections for more on these common blues song types. 12-bar blues The name is pretty self-explanatory: In 12-bar blues, you have 12 bars, or measures, of music to work with. In each verse of the 12-bar blues (you can have as many verses as you want, but usually a 12-bar blues composition has three or four), the third 4-bar segment works to resolve the previous 4 bars. The resolution, or conclusion, to the I chord at the end of the verse may signal the end of the song. Or, if the 12th bar is a V chord, the resolution to the I chord signals that you go back to the beginning of the song to repeat the progression for another verse. If the song continues on to a new verse, the V chord at the end of the song is called the turnaround. The most commonly used pattern — read from left to right, starting at the top and working down — for the 12-bar blues looks like this: I I I I IV IV I I V IV I V/I (turnaround) So if you were playing a 12-bar blues song in the key of C, you would play it like this: C C C C F F C C G F C G/C (turnaround) If you can hit those chords in that order, you have the bare bones for Muddy Waters’s classic “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had.” Change the tonic (I) chord to an A (AAAA DDAA EDAE/A), and you have Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues.” If you’re playing the 12-bar blues in a minor key, here’s the common pattern to use: i iv i i iv iv i i ii V i v/i (turnaround) Count Basie’s famous and much-loved variation on the 12-bar blues took elements of both the major and minor keys, as shown here: I IV I v IV IV I VI ii V I v/I (turnaround) 8-bar blues 8-bar blues is similar to 12-bar blues — it just has shorter verses in it and a slightly different common use of chord progressions. Here’s the standard pattern used for 8-bar blues: I IV I VI ii V I V/I (turnaround) 16-bar blues Another variation on the basic 12-bar blues is the 16-bar blues. Where the 8-bar blues is four bars shorter than the 12-bar blues, the 16-bar blues, as you can probably guess, is that much longer. The 16-bar blues uses the same basic chord pattern structure as the 12-bar blues, with the 9th and 10th measures stated twice, like so: I I I I IV IV I I V IV V IV V IV I V/I 24-bar blues The 24-bar blues progression is similar to a 12-bar traditional blues progression except that each chord progression is doubled in duration, like so: I I I I I I I I IV IV IV IV I I I I V V IV IV I I I V/I (turnaround) 32-bar blues ballads and country The 32-bar blues pattern is where you see the true roots of rock and jazz music. This extended version of the 12-bar blues pattern has the AABA structure, also called song form, that was adopted by rock bands in the 1960s. The pattern is also referred to as the SRDC Model: Statement (A1), Restatement (A2), Departure (B), and Conclusion (A3). A typical 32-bar blues layout can look something like this: (A1) I I VI VI ii V IV V (A2) I I VI VI ii V IV I (B) I I I I IV IV IV IV (A3) I I VI VI ii V IV V/I When it was first created, 32-bar blues wasn’t nearly as popular with “true” blues performers as the 12-bar structure was, partly because it didn’t work as well with the short call-and-response form of lyricism that earmarked the blues. It did work well for the country music genre, though, and Hank Williams (Sr.) used this construction in songs like “Your Cheating Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome (I Could Cry).” Freddy Fender used this structure in his hits “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” and “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.” However, when this particular blues structure was picked up by people like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin; a lot — perhaps all — of the true heart of blues disappeared from the resulting music. The 32-bar blues transitioned into popular songs like “Frosty the Snowman” and “I Got Rhythm.” The 32-bar blues also was significantly altered by the intervention of other classically trained composers, who mixed the ideas of the sonata and the rondo with the traditional American blues. The result was the eventual creation of non-bluesy-sounding songs that used such aspects of classical music as the ability to change keys during the bridge section of a song. Having fun with rock and pop Most early rock and pop songs follow the structure of either the 12-bar blues or the 32-bar blues (see those sections earlier in this chapter). Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” is one variation of the 12-bar blues structure used in rock, as is the Rolling Stones’s “19th Nervous Breakdown.” The Beach Boys were masters of the 32-bar structure, using it in such songs as “Good Vibrations” and “Surfer Girl.” The Beatles also used this structure in many of their songs, including “From Me to You” and “Hey Jude.” Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire,” The Righteous Brothers’s “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” all also use the AABA 32-bar.In 32-bar pop music, the music is broken into four 8-bar sections. Songs like Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing” follow the AABA 32-bar structure, whereas Charlie Parker took the rondo approach (ABAC) to the 32-bar variation in songs like “Ornithology” and “Donna Lee.” Compound AABA form really should be called AABAB2 form (but it isn’t), because in this form, after you play the first 32 bars, you move into a second bridge section (B2) that sends you right back to the beginning of the song to repeat the original 32 bars of the song. The Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’s “Refugee” all follow this pattern.The verse-chorus structure (also called ABAB form) is the most widely used form in rock and pop music today. Verse-chorus form follows the structure of the lyrics attached to it. You can, of course, write an instrumental piece that follows the same pattern as a verse-chorus rock or pop song, but the structure itself gets its name from the way the words in a song fit together. Verse-chorus songs are laid out like this: Introduction (I): The introduction sets the mood and is usually instrumental, although sometimes it may include a spoken recitation, like in Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” Verse (V): The verse begins the story of the song. Chorus (C): The chorus is the most memorable lyrical points of the song — the song’s Verse (V): Another verse continues the story. Chorus (C): The second chorus reinforces the hook. Bridge (B): The bridge, which may be instrumental or lyrical, usually occurs only once in the song and forms a contrast with the repetition of verses and choruses. Chorus (C): The final chorus repeats the original chorus to fade, or it just stops at the I chord. The typical rock and pop song structure, as we describe it here, is IVCVCBC. And just as in the 12-bar blues structure, the chords of choice are the I, IV, and V chords. Thousands, perhaps even millions, of popular songs follow this structure. The Beatles’s “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” Tom Jones’s “Sex Bomb,” Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” and Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” are all examples of this structure used in contemporary pop music. The really amazing thing is how different from one another, either by virtue of lyrics or the music itself, one song can sound from the next. Improvising with jazz The true spirit of jazz has always been improvisation, which makes identifying the actual construction of jazz most difficult. The goal in jazz is to create a new interpretation of an established piece (called a standard), or to build on an established piece of music by changing the melody, harmonies, or even the time signature. It’s almost like the point of jazz is to break away from form. The closest way to define how jazz is constructed is to take the basic idea behind blues vocalizations — the call-and-response vocals — and replace the voices with the various instruments that make up the jazz sound: brass, bass, percussive (including piano), and wind instruments, along with the more recent inclusion, the electric guitar. In Dixieland jazz, for example, musicians take turns playing the lead melody on their instruments while the others improvise countermelodies, or contrasting secondary melodies, that follow along in the background. The one predictable element of music in the jazz genre — excluding free jazz, where no real discernible rules exist but jazz instrumentation is used — is the rhythm. All jazz music, with the exception of free jazz, uses clear, regular meter and strongly pulsed rhythms that can be heard throughout the music. Twelve-tone compositions Twelve-tone music—also known as serial composition — is a compositional technique invented by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1921, heavily influenced by the atonal compositions of Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky. Twelve-tone compositions are based on the twelve-tone chromatic scale, in which each note is separated from the next by a half-step, as opposed to the diatonic scale, which is the eight-note scale. The fun thing about twelve-tone compositions is that as long as you follow the pattern variations built on the prime row, you can jump around to different octaves to add interest to your composition. The goal of a twelve-tone composition is to use every tone in the chromatic scale before repeating any notes. Each sequence of twelve notes is called a “tone row,” and twelve-tone compositions are basically variations on the first presented tone row. Let’s say your tone row starts on B natural and ends on F natural, as shown. After you lay out your first tone row, or the prime row (or P-form), your second variation can be an inversion of the original pattern, in which you start with B natural again, but where, in the first pattern, you take one half-step down on the second note, you go a half-step up on the second note instead. This is called the inversion form, or I-form, as seen here. Basically, everything you did in the first pattern, you take the opposite approach in the inversion, which leads you to an F natural an octave above where you started. Another way to lay the notes out is called a retrograde pattern, or R-form. This is where you start on the last note of the first tone row (F) and present the entire line again backwards, ending on B, like shown. The last commonly-used form, retrograde inversion (RI-form) is when you take the R-form and make the exact opposite steps you made in the retrograde pattern. So in the following, starting on a high F, you go down three half-tones (ending on a D), which is exactly the opposite as you did in the R-form, where you started on an F and went up three half-tones to an A-flat, as shown. While there are many other combinations possible, these are the three basic compositional techniques used in twelve-tone compositions. Perhaps the best known contemporary twelve-tone/serial composer is Philip Glass, whose distinctive twelve-tone compositions have been used extensively in soundtracks for films including North Star (1977), Candyman (1992), The Truman Show (1999), and The Hours (2002).

Article / Updated 10-13-2019

Notes and rests in music are written on what musicians call a musical staff (or staves, if you’re talking about two). A staff is made of five parallel horizontal lines, containing four spaces between them, as shown. Notes and rests are written on the lines and spaces of the staff. The particular musical notes that are meant by each line and space depend on which clef is written at the beginning of the staff. You may run across any of the following clefs (though the first two are the most common): Treble clef Bass clef C clefs, including alto and tenor Think of each clef as a graph of pitches, or tones, shown as notes plotted over time on five lines and four spaces. Each pitch or tone is named after one of the first seven letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C … and it keeps on going that way indefinitely, repeating the note names as the pitches repeat in octaves. The pitches ascend as you go from A to G, with every eighth note — where you return to your starting letter — signifying the beginning of a new octave. The following sections give you more details on the clefs individually and together (called a grand staff). We also take a look at the C clef and when you might cross paths with it. The treble clef The treble clef is for higher-pitched notes. It contains the notes above middle C on the piano, which means all the notes you play with your right hand on the piano. On the guitar, the treble clef is usually the only clef you ever read. Most woodwind instruments, high brass instruments, and violins stick solely to the treble clef. Any instrument that makes upper-register, or high, sounds has its music written in the treble clef. The treble clef is also sometimes called the G clef. Note that the shape of the treble clef itself resembles a stylized G. The loop on the treble clef also circles the second line on the staff, which is the note G, as shown. The notes are located in the treble clef on lines and spaces, in order of ascending pitch, as shown. The bass clef On the piano, the bass clef contains lower-pitched notes, the ones below middle C, including all the notes you play with your left hand on the piano. Music is generally written in the bass clef for lower wind instruments like the bassoon, the lower brass instruments like the tuba, and the lower stringed instruments like the bass guitar. Another name for the bass clef is the F clef. The curly top of the clef partly encircles where the F note is on the staff, and it has two dots that surround the F note, as shown. (It also looks a bit like a cursive letter F, if you use your imagination.) The notes on the bass clef are arranged in ascending order, as shown. The grand staff and middle C Put the treble and bass clefs together and you get the grand staff, as shown. Middle C is located one line below the treble clef and one line above the bass clef. But it’s not in either clef. Instead it’s written on a ledger line. Ledger lines are lines written above the bass clef and below the treble clef that are necessary to connect the two clefs. Put it all together, and the notes flow smoothly from one clef to the other with no interruptions. C clefs: Alto and tenor Occasionally, you may come across an animal known as the C clef. The C clef is a moveable clef that you can place on any line of the staff. The line that runs through the center of the C clef, no matter which line that is, is considered middle C, as you can see. C clefs are preferred in classical notation for instrumental ranges that hover right above or right below middle C. Instead of having to constantly switch between reading treble and bass clefs, a musician has just one musical staff to read. C clefs were more commonly used before sheet music was standardized and able to easily accommodate a wide range of tones. Today, the only C clefs commonly used are the following: The alto clef: Puts middle C on the third staff line; most commonly used for writing viola music. The tenor clef: Puts middle C on the next-to-the-top line of the staff; most commonly used for writing cello, trombone, and bassoon music.

Article / Updated 10-13-2019

Simple time signatures are the easiest to count, because a one-two pulse in a piece of music feels the most natural to a listener and a performer. The following four requirements indicate that a time signature is a simple one: Each beat is divided into two equal components. If a single beat has more than one note, those notes are always grouped together to equal one beat. This characteristic is most obvious when it’s applied to eighth and smaller notes. In simple time, two eighth notes are always connected together with a bar called a beam, as are four sixteenth notes, or eight thirty-second notes. (If you have two sixteenth notes and one eighth note, those three notes, which equal one beat, are also beamed together.) The following figure shows the progression of how notes are beamed together in simple time. The note that gets one beat has to be an undotted note. When you’re counting a song out in your head, you’re going to be counting only undotted notes that are divisible by two. Usually this means you’ll be counting quarter notes, but you also may be counting half notes, whole notes, or, sometimes, eighth notes. In 4/4 time, for example, in your head you’ll be counting, “One-two-three-four” over and over again. In 3/4 time, it’ll be “one-two-three” over and over again; in 2/4 time, “one-two.” The top number isn’t divisible by 3 except when it is For example, 3/4 and 3/8 are considered simple time signatures, whereas 6/4, 6/8, and 9/16 aren’t (because they are divisible by 3; these are compound time signatures). The number of beats is the same in every measure. Every measure, or bar, of music in a simple time signature has the same number of beats throughout the song. After you get into the groove of counting out the time, you don’t have to worry about doing anything but making sure the notes in the song follow that beat all the way through. The following sections explain how to use measures to count in simple time and provide you with some counting practice. Using measures to count in simple time Measures (or bars) help performers keep track of where they are in a piece of music and help them play the appropriate beat. In simple time, the measure is where the true rhythm of a piece of music can be felt, even if you’re just reading a piece of sheet music without playing it. In simple time, a slightly stronger accent is placed on the first beat of each measure. Here are some common examples of simple time signatures (some of which we describe in the following sections): 4/4: Used in popular, classical, rock, jazz, country, bluegrass, hip-hop, and house music 3/4: Used for waltzes and country and western ballads 2/4: Used in polkas and marches 3/8: Used in waltzes, minuets, and country and western ballads 2/2: Used in marches and slow-moving processionals Counting 4/4 time When you see a line of music that has a 4/4 time signature like the one in the following figure, the beat is counted off like this: ONE two three four ONE two three four ONE two three four The bottom number 4 in the time signature in the figure tells you that the quarter note gets the beat, and the top number 4 tells you that each measure contains four beats, or four quarter notes. Because 4/4 time is so often used in popular types of music, it’s frequently referred to as common time. In fact, instead of writing “4/4” for the time signature, some composers just write a large “C” instead. Counting 3/4 time If the time signature of a line of music is 3/4, as in the following figure, the beat is counted like this: ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three Counting 3/8 time If the time signature is 3/8, the first note in the measure— whatever it may be — gets a slight stress. In this figure, that first note is an eighth note. You count out the beat of the music shown in the figure like this: ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three The time signatures 3/8 and 3/4 have almost exactly the same rhythm structure in the way the beat is counted off. However, because 3/8 uses eighth notes instead of quarter notes, the eighth notes get the beat. Counting 2/2 time If the time signature of a line is 2/2, also called cut time, the half note gets the beat. And because the top number determines that the measure contains two beats, you know that each measure has two half notes, as shown. You count the music in the figure like this: ONE two ONE two Time signatures with a 2 as the lower number were widely used in medieval and pre-medieval music. Music from this period used a rhythm structure, called a tactus — later called a minim — that was based on the rhythm pattern of a human heartbeat. Practicing counting beats in simple time Using the information from the preceding sections, practice counting out the beats (not the notes) shown in the following series of figures. When counting these beats out loud, remember to give the first beat a slight stress. For a challenge, try tapping out the notes while you count the beats out loud. Exercise 1 ONE two three four | ONE two three four | ONE two three four Exercise 2 ONE two three | ONE two three | ONE two three Exercise 3 ONE two three | ONE two three | ONE two three Exercise 4 ONE two three | ONE two three | ONE two three Exercise 5 ONE two | ONE two | ONE two

Article / Updated 10-10-2019

One of the most important things to remember about music theory is that music came first. Music existed for thousands of years before theory came along to explain what people were trying to accomplish when pounding on their drums. So, don’t ever think that you can’t be a good musician just because you’ve never taken a theory class. In fact, if you are a good musician, you likely already know a lot of theory. You simply may not know the terminology or technicalities. The concepts and rules that make up music theory are much like the grammatical rules that govern written language (which also came along after people had successfully discovered how to talk to one another). Just as being able to transcribe language made it possible for people far away to “hear” conversations and stories the way the author intended, being able to transcribe music allows musicians to read and play compositions exactly as the composer intended. Learning to read music is a lot like learning a new language, to the point where a fluent person can “hear” a musical “conversation” when reading a piece of sheet music. Plenty of people in the world can’t read or write, but they can still communicate their thoughts and feelings verbally just fine. In the same way, plenty of intuitive, self-taught musicians have never learned to read or write music and find the whole idea of learning music theory tedious and unnecessary. However, just like the educational leaps that can come with learning to read and write, music theory can help musicians master new techniques, perform unfamiliar styles of music, and develop the confidence they need to try new things. Unearthing music theory’s beginnings From what historians can tell, by the time the ancient world was beginning to establish itself — approximately 7000 B.C. — musical instruments had already achieved a complexity in design that would be carried all the way into the present. For example, some of the bone flutes found from this time period are still playable, and short performances have been recorded on them for modern listeners to hear. Similarly, pictographs and funerary ornaments have shown that by 3500 B.C., Egyptians were using harps as well as double-reed clarinets, lyres, and their own version of the flute. By 1500 B.C., the Hittites of northern Syria had modified the traditional Egyptian lute/harp design and invented the first two-stringed guitar, with a long, fretted neck, tuning pegs at the top of the neck, and a hollow soundboard to amplify the sound of the strings being plucked. A lot of unanswered questions remain about ancient music, such as why so many different cultures came up with so many of the same tonal qualities in their music completely independent of one another. Many theorists have concluded that certain patterns of notes just sound right to listeners, and certain other patterns don’t. Music theory, then, very simply, could be defined as a search for how and why music sounds right or wrong. In other words, the purpose of music theory is to explain why something sounded the way it did and how that sound can be made again. Many people consider ancient Greece to be the actual birthplace of music theory, because the ancient Greeks started entire schools of philosophy and science built around dissecting every aspect of music that was known then. Even Pythagoras (the triangle guy) got into the act by creating the 12-pitch octave scale similar to the one that musicians and composers still use today. He did this via the first Circle of Fifths, a device still religiously used by musicians from all walks of life. Another famous Greek scientist and philosopher, Aristotle, is responsible for many books about music theory. He began a rudimentary form of music notation that remained in use in Greece and subsequent cultures for nearly a thousand years after his death. In fact, so much music theory groundwork was laid in ancient Greece that substantial changes didn’t seem necessary until the European Renaissance nearly 2,000 years later. Neighbors and conquerors of Greece were all more than happy to incorporate Greek math, science, philosophy, art, literature, and music into their own cultures. Music theory fundamentals While it would be nice to be one of those people who can sit at any instrument and play beautiful music without any training whatsoever, most folks need some sort of structured instruction, whether from a teacher or from reading a book. Here, we go over the basic information you need to start learning how to read music, play scales, understand key signatures, build chords, and compose with forms. The foundation: Notes, rests, and beats Learning how to read music is essential to a musician, especially one who wants to share his music with other musicians or discover what other musicians are playing. By studying the basic elements, such as time values of each type of written note, musical rests, time signatures, and rhythm, you put yourself on the path to mastering music. All these elements come together to establish a foundation that allows you to read, play, and study music. Manipulating and combining notes Reading musical notes on both the treble and bass clef staves as well as finding notes on the piano and guitar — the two most common instruments on which people teach themselves to play — are crucial to making and studying music. When you can read notes on the staves, you can determine a musical piece’s key signature, which is a group of symbols that tells you what key that song is written in. You can use the Circle of Fifths to help train yourself to read key signatures on sight by counting the sharps or flats in a time signature. After you’ve become familiar with key signatures, you’re ready to move on to intervals, chords, and chord progressions, which create the complexity of musical sound — from pleasing and soothing to tense and in need of resolution. You build scales and chords using simple or compound intervals: melodic and harmonic. Linking the keyboard to music notation Prior to the Renaissance period, few truly innovative changes occurred in music technology. Stringed instruments, woodwinds, horns, and percussion instruments had been around for thousands of years, and although they had experienced many improvements in design and playing technique, they were essentially the same instruments used by the people of ancient cultures. It wasn’t until the 1300s that a new musical interface appeared: the keyboard. With the invention of the keyboard came the beginning of modern musical notation — written music. The keyboard-notation link was fostered because of the ease of composing for full orchestras on the keyboard. Also, most newly commissioned work was created for keyboard instruments because of the public’s perception of the keyboard as a superior instrument. Fifteenth-century French composers began adding as many lines as they needed to their musical staves. They also wrote music with multiple staves to be played simultaneously by different instruments. Because the keyboard has so many notes available, separate staves for left- and right-handed playing began to be used. These staves are the bass clef and the treble clef. Keyboards also had the advantage of being incredibly easy to build chords on. By the 17th century, the five-lined staff was considered standard for most musical instrumentation — probably because it was easier and cheaper to print just one kind of sheet music for musicians to compose on. The system hasn’t changed much over the past four centuries, and it probably won’t change again until a new, more-appealing instrument interface enters the scene. Musical form and compositions Most popular and classical music is composed using specific forms. A form is a structural blueprint used to create a certain type of music. The building blocks of form include musical phrases and periods, and rhythm, melody, and harmony enter the picture to create the genre, or style, of a piece of music. When sitting down to write music, you have to choose what form you’re going to follow; for example, classical or popular. You can choose from many different classical and popular forms, including sonatas, concertos, 16-bar blues, and verse-chorus form. You can create varied sound in whatever form you choose by playing with tempo, dynamics, and instrument tone color. How theory can help your music If you didn’t know better, you may think that music was something that could start on any note, go wherever it wanted, and stop whenever the performer felt like getting up for a glass of iced tea. Although it’s true that many folks have been to musical performances that actually do follow this style of “composition,” for the most part these performances are confusing and annoyingly self-indulgent and feel a little pointless. The only people who can pull off a spontaneous jam well are those who know music thoroughly enough to stack chords and notes next to one another so they make sense to listeners. And, because music is inherently a form of communication, connecting with your listeners is the goal. Getting to know more about music theory is also incredibly inspiring. Nothing can describe the feeling you get when the light bulb goes off in your head and you suddenly realize you can put a 12-bar blues progression together and build a really good song out of it. Or when you can look at a piece of classical music and find yourself looking forward to playing through it for the first time. Or the first time you sit down to jam with your friends and find you have the confidence to take the lead. As a musician, the inescapable fact is this: What you get out of music is what you put into it. If you want to be able to play classical music, you must know how to sight-read and know how to keep a steady beat. If you plan to become a rock guitarist, knowing what notes you need to play in a given key is especially important. Knowing how to play music takes a lot of personal discipline, but in the end, it’s worth all the hard work. Plus, of course, playing music is fun, and knowing how to play music well is incredibly fun. Everybody loves a rock star/jazz man/Mozart.

Article / Updated 10-10-2019

The difficulty in putting together a Top Ten list of revolutionary music or musical movements is that so much of what modern Western civilization knows of revolutionary music is very limited. History is full of people like the Spanish priest Diego de Landa, who dedicated his life to destroying Mayan literature and history, or Emperor Jovian, who destroyed all non-Christian texts and musical scores in the Library of Antioch, or Genghis Khan, who famously sacked and destroyed the libraries of Iran and Iraq. The following can only be considered a partial list of some of the revolutionary techniques that changed music in general as well as some of the revolutionary music that changed the world. 800 A.D.—England, Gregorian chant Gregorian chant may not seem like a revolutionary form of music, in that its history and use is almost inextricably tied to the Roman Catholic Church—it’s even named after Pope Gregory I, who is credited for popularizing the form. However, since music was such an important part of Church services, and so much of Western civilization was influenced by what was and wasn’t allowed by the early Church, it makes sense that the advent of it is a starting point for many musical innovations and revolutions. Way back in the days when all entertainment was live, one of the many reasons many people flocked to Church services was for the entertainment value—lots of work and money was poured into the construction of medieval churches, resulting in huge, beautiful buildings with amazing acoustics for choir performances. In the 9th century, Pope Gregory I began gathering hymns from smaller country churches and picked out the best to be used in standard church services throughout Europe. Because musical instruments weren’t allowed in the Church at the time, all of the hymns collected were performed a cappella, usually by an all-male choir. While most music theorists dispute the notion that Pope Gregory I invented Gregorian chant, it’s well understood that the man was a true music lover, and dedicated most of his life in seeking out, collecting, and introducing music to the masses. The defining feature of Gregorian chant is that it’s performed monophonic a cappella. In monophonic music, a single musical line is performed by one or multiple voices, with no contrasting harmony. The more voices you put together in a monophony, the louder the resulting music is, and when you use multiple-pitched singers, that single line gains great depth and resonance. In short, it’s perfectly suited for the acoustics of a large, hollow interior of a Gothic cathedral. Gregorian chant was aggressively promoted by the Church, and especially by Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, who was apparently a big fan of the style, required the clergy to only perform Gregorian chants in their services on pain of death. By the time Pope Stephen V came into power in 885 A.D., Gregorian chant had spread throughout England, Germany, Scandinavia, Iceland, Finland, and the Eastern Catholic lands of Poland, Moravia and Slovakia. One of the most important side effects of gathering hymns from these small country churches was the realization that there did not exist a standardized way to write music down, so all of the songs, in order to preserve them for posterity, had to be recorded using some sort of universal system. Eventually, these experiments with music transcription led to Bishop Guido D’Arezzo’s invention of solfege, which was the first universally-used (and understood) music notational system in post-Roman Empire Europe. 1100 A.D.—Organum/European polyphony Not long after the invention and quick spread of solfege, it became possible for composers—still mostly elite members of the Roman Catholic Church—to start adding little harmonic flourishes to the melodic line of Gregorian chant. Because, while it was entirely possible for people to sing these harmonic flourishes on their own, most singers following a piece of sheet music don’t do that, and when those singers are part of a 12th-century church choir, they most certainly do not add those vocal flourishes on their own. These flourishes are called organum, or polyphony, which just means a piece of music with more than one singing part—specifically, melody plus harmony. Some of the first experiments with transcribed organum were written down by Guido D’Arezzo himself, which shows how confident he was in his new system of universal music transcription. Several types of organum were used in early European polyphony. There’s parallel organum, in which the same notes are sung by all members of the choir but are expressed in different octaves. In free organum, the top (highest) and the bottom (lowest) voices of the choir can vary how they hold a note, with the strong middle section of the choir carrying the melody. In Notre Dame melismatic organum, the bottom voice can vary from the melody in both tone and rhythm, while in St. Martial melismatic organum, these variations are expressed in the top voice. Taken in the context of modern music, these don’t seem like huge leaps in compositional style, but the fact that these tiny flourishes could all now be written on a piece of sheet music for other choirs to replicate near perfectly was probably a huge incentive for composers to come up with more interesting and complicated music. It’s also fitting that around the same time that D’Arezzo presented his solfege system, stained glass had been perfected and the Church began installing huge stained glass windows in its cathedrals, making a visit to your neighborhood church a visual as well as aural event. 1649—England, the Diggers The Diggers started out as a group of fifteen Protestant farmers and landowners that decided to form their own commune and isolate themselves from the rest of England, specifically from the power of the monarchy and the Church of England. Founded by Quaker activist Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers (or True Levellers, as they’re also sometimes called) believed in economic equality and a strict leveling of the social order. They are considered to be the first post-Roman Empire European socialist/anarchist community, and while they were a relatively small community of group-owned farms scattered across England, the impact of their ideas, and especially their music, lasted centuries longer than they did. In 1649, the Diggers began vegetable gardens in common land in Surrey and posted announcements in the area announcing free meat, drink, and clothes to anyone who would join their commune and help work the common land. Their intent was to get enough citizens to join the Diggers and contribute their small parcels of land to the cause that the whole area would become privately-owned communal property. Because property ownership equaled power, this would make the Diggers a powerful political influencer, so the local authorities stepped in and chased the Diggers out of Surrey. For the next couple of years, smaller Digger communities appeared in other parts of England, but by 1651, the movement was over, largely due to government interference. Gone, but not forgotten—more than 300 years later, an offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troupe calling themselves Diggers set up camp in Golden Gate Park and gave out free food, free clothes, and preached to passersby about socialism, anarchy, and the joys of living an agrarian lifestyle. One of the surprising legacies of the short-lived Diggers is their protest anthem, composed by Winstanley, called “Diggers’ Song.” This anthem was carried by Quakers into the New World, where it was adopted by the Amish, Mennonites, and other agrarian religious groups, and later, labor movements in the U.S., the U.K., and the Soviet Union. English folksinger Leon Rosselson recorded the anthem under the title “You Noble Diggers All,” while pop band Chumbawamba included it in their 1988 release English Rebel Songs 1381-1914. 17th century: Italy, opera Even though today opera is presented as something mostly appreciated by elite music consumers, when it first made its appearance on the stage, it was meant for everybody. Just as the ancient Greeks had their theatre, the Romans had their Coliseum, and Elizabethan England had its plays, 17th century Italians had their opera. While most opera performances were initially unveiled at their patrons’ houses—such as the first recognized Italian opera, Daphne, which was first privately screened in 1598 at the estate of composer Jacopo Corsi—after the first performance, you could see and hear that same opera repeatedly performed in spaces all over Italy. Puppeteers would often base their acts on popular operas, reenacting the live stage show in miniature to the delight of children and adults. The one defining quality of opera is not the costumes or the set or the quality of singers—it’s that the entire performance is sung, and if there are any significant speaking parts in a performance, then the production is considered musical theatre. Even though opera was meant for popular consumption, this is not to say that the inventors of opera, specifically Italian opera, didn’t have incredibly lofty aspirations for their compositions. The original intent of Italian opera was to combine complex poetry with equally complex music with the purpose of driving a storyline across, so that you’d end up with a synthesis of all popular genres of entertainment. In this way, opera really was meant to be for everyone—fans of great music, fans of great literature, and fans of beautiful sets and costumes. There are no rules regarding what kind of music is in the opera, too, which is why its basic form has survived for hundreds of years, and has evolved to produce spectacular rock operas like “Jesus Christ Superstar” and comic operas like “The Mikado” (and its lounge-music-filled film adaptation, “The Cool Mikado”). 1789-1799: The French Revolution Many consider the French Revolution as the birth of the modern protest song, in that songs were introduced that could be easily learned and adapted to suit whatever was happening. Proper names were easily interchanged in these songs, as well as specific events and place names. They made the perfect marching song for mobs of revolutionaries. Perhaps the most famous of these songs is 1792’s “La Carmagnole,” now considered the official song of the French Revolution. The name of the original composer has been lost, but the tune, often accompanied by wild dancing, spread like wildfire among the French peasant classes. During the Revolution, the song was turned into a battle cry at the Battle of Jemappes in 1792, along with another popular song, “La Marseillaise.” In that same year, thousands of peasants stormed Paris’ Tuileries Palace, singing “La Carmagnole” (“Go, Louis, big crybaby/from the Temple into the tower”) as they forced Louis XVI and his consorts to flee the palace. Since the revolution, “La Marseillaise” has become the French National Anthem, often sung in conjunction with “La Carmagnole.” 1913—Atonal Music and Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” Atonal music is music without a tonal center, which simply means it is not set in any key. Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and Leon Kirchner are some of the better known composers of classical atonal music, while jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and Eric Dolphy composed a great many free jazz pieces without a tonal center. In the early part of the 20th century, however, the mainstream classical audience had almost no contact with atonal compositions. Bartók, while considered an influential atonal composer now, was better known in his heyday for seeking out and reproducing Eastern European folk music, and most of his atonal compositions were only heard by people who actively sought them out. Schoenberg was another atonal composer considered highly influential now, but during the time he was professor at the Second Viennese School of music, much of his work in atonality was considered more of an academic exercise than an attempt to create music for the masses. In fact, the stated goal of composing atonal music by the Second Viennese School was to combat a perceived “crisis of tonality” in mainstream music. Atonal music had been fomenting in the dark underground music scenes of universities and galleries for several decades by the time Igor Stravinsky unfurled it on a public already rattled by the advent of World War I in the 1913 Paris premier of his best-known orchestral work, “The Rite of Spring.” Famously, the performance resulted in reported violent confrontations between the upper class who came expecting to hear beautiful, accessible music and the “Bohemian” group who loved anything and everything new because they hated the status quo so much. “The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect,” wrote one exasperated critic of the night. The unusual use of bassoons for the high-pitched opening section of the melody was also repeatedly commented on, as was the “aggressive” pulsating rhythms that apparently inspired the man seated directly behind music critic Carl Van Vechten to start pounding in time on the noted journalist’s head. While following performances of the Rite of Spring have not resulted in riots as the premiere did, audiences continue to be alarmed, dismayed, and enthralled by the composition, including generations of children who will forever equate the orchestral composition with peaceful herbivorous dinosaurs being terrorized by a marauding Tyrannosaurus Rex in Disney’s Fantasia. 1950-1990: Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, “Nueva Canción” (the New Song Movement) Nueva canción was a musical movement that started almost simultaneously in Argentina, Chile, and Spain, and spread across the Iberian peninsula in Europe and everywhere in Latin America. Its highly political lyrics, set to whatever music was traditional the specific region, reflected the disquiet of Iberian peoples under the dictatorship of Franco’s Spain and the authoritarianism of Salazar’s Portugal, while in Latin America, nueva canción focused on shrugging free the last vestiges of European colonialism. Both in Europe and in Latin America, the music was integrally tied with revolutionary politics and labor movements. The musicians were often jailed, “disappeared,” exiled, tortured, and blatantly murdered by various right-wing dictatorships for their music. Chilean songwriter Víctor Jara’s music far outlived its composer—during the Pinochet coup in Chile, Jara was taken with thousands of other protestors to Chile Stadium, where he was tortured and shot. Under Pinochet, nueva canción recordings were seized and destroyed, and radio stations were forbidden to play the music. Even traditional Andean instruments were banned in an attempt to quash nueva canción music entirely. This period in Chilean history is known as the apagón cultural—the cultural blackout. However, as history has shown many times, political intervention and suppression doesn’t always destroy a song or an idea. Forty years after it was first recorded, Chilean songwriter Violeta Para’s song, “Gracias a la Vida” (“Thanks to the Life”) found new life as the anthem for the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, clear on the other side of the planet. Meanwhile, Argentinian folksinger Atahualpa Yupanqui went from being a political exile from his homeland in 1931 to being invited by the French government to compose a piece to commemorate the Bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989. 1960s: U.S. Civil Rights Movement There are perhaps no protest songs more familiar to audiences in the U.S. than those of the Civil Rights Movement. This is probably because most of the songs now considered the official Civil Rights canon were turned into standards by some of the best blues, jazz, and folk music performers of the 20th century. Even though it predated the Civil Rights Movement itself, Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching, is considered by many to be the official song of the movement. Even though the single was banned from the airwaves at the time of its 1939 release, it was such an amazing, powerful song that it still sold over one million copies. In 1965, Nina Simone recorded her own powerful, stark version of the song, causing some music critics to immediately name it “The Song of the Century.” John Coltrane’s dark, moody jazz piece, “Alabama,” was written after he heard about the four little girls killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and may be one of the few recognizable protest songs with no lyrics. Conversely, another song that exemplified the Civil Rights Movement was Curtis Mayfield’s powerfully joyful “People Get Ready,” which carried the basic message that good times were just around the corner, so you’d better get ready for them. Also on that theme was Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” allegedly inspired by his own experiences trying to perform in whites-only venues across America. These sentiments are also echoed in the lyrics of folk singer Bob Dylan’s counterculture anthem, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” But perhaps no song said it better, louder, or bolder than that outspoken social activist and self-proclaimed leader of the Afro-American movement, James Brown. Brown wrote “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” during a trip to Vietnam to entertain the troops—the song has become the anthem for the Civil Rights Movement through its many permutations to this day. 1980s: Estonia Singing Revolution Perhaps one of the most amazing revolutions of recent years was the Estonian Singing Revolution, which attained its goals of becoming independent from the Soviet Union by mostly nonviolent, peaceful means. Under Russia’s—later, the Soviet Union’s—occupation, for centuries, Estonians were forbidden from singing their traditional songs or even speaking their language. However, instead of letting their native culture die under this occupation, the people of Estonia kept their songs and literature and language alive in secret, until 1869, when publisher Johann Voldemar Jannsen organized the first Song Celebration as part of an underground Estonian national awakening movement. Over 800 singers participated in the first festival, and all the songs were sung in Estonian. Russian authorities didn’t pay much attention to the festival, possibly because too many people were participating in the peaceful festival for them to respond in any way that wouldn’t bring about really bad publicity for them. A second and third festival were organized within a few years, and by the fourth festival in 1891, women were also participating in the choirs. A few years after that, hundreds of children had joined as well, and by then, there wasn’t anything anyone could do to stop the people of Estonia from singing. The choir continued to grow steadily through World War I, World War II, surviving several fierce and terrifying propaganda campaigns aimed at the singers and Estonian nationalism in general by Stalin. Despite threats of arrest and imprisonment under the new U.S.S.R, 20,000 to 30,000 singers at a time would show up to sing Estonian folksongs defiantly every year, with the rest of the country pouring into the fairgrounds to watch and sing along. Raising the banned Estonian flag over them as they sang, the performances continued to be peaceful and nonviolent even in the worst of times. In 1988, musicians in the Tartu Pop Music Festival contributed original material as well as singing the banned traditional songs, unleashing a sense of national identity that saw tens of thousands of audience members linking hands and singing together. Subsequent festivals saw politicians from around the world showing up to support the Estonian cause and to witness the singing festivals, especially the choirs that had grown to include a full 10% of the population of Estonia. In 1991, after the Estonian Congress and Supreme Soviet formally repudiated Soviet legislation and declared Estonia an independent state, Soviet tanks crossed into the republic in an effort to suppress the Estonian nationalism movement. The Soviet tanks specifically targeted the radio towers that were broadcasting Estonian music to bolster the populace, and hundreds of Estonians retaliated by forming a nonviolent human shield around the radio stations that the tanks could not penetrate without drawing the military ire of the rest of the world. That same year, the new Russian leadership formally recognized the independence of Estonia and the other Baltic states. 2010-2012: Arab Spring Despite the fact that in many Arab states, singing and dancing is considered shameful, popular music, particular hip-hop and rap, has thrived as an underground musical movement. In the 1990s, Arabic communities outside of the Middle East, especially in Germany and France, even started up record labels specializing in Turkish, Palestinian, and Tunisian rap music, featuring performers that received no radio play in their home countries and were barely known outside of their immediate fan base. American hip-hop and rap music was also smuggled into Arab states, where fans of the contraband genre made multiple copies to pass around to friends. Much of this changed with the Arab Spring, which started when Tunisian protestors overthrew President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Almost overnight, similar protests sprung up in Egypt, Yemen, and Morocco, most of which were organized by young men and women who felt they didn’t have a voice in a government made up of aging theocrats. One of the many issues repeatedly brought up was that of censorship of art, music, and youth culture in general, and as a result, perhaps the most lasting impression the outside world had of the Arab Spring were the hundreds of musical concerts that erupted spontaneously all over the Middle East. Saudi Arabian rappers like Dark2Men performed in public for the first time without fear of immediate imprisonment, as did Tunisia’s El General, Morocco’s El Haqed, and Palestine’s DAM. While many of the goals of the Arab Spring have still not come to fruition, what has happened is that the protest music of the Arab states has successfully reached the ears of both the local populace and to the rest of the world. Many Arab bands now have YouTube channels that are regularly updated with new songs and videos, giving them the security of having an audience that knows they exist. The hip-hop music of the Arab Spring has become the voice of resistance, addressing poverty, violence, drug use, and social inequality.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

In the sixth century B.C., the Greek scholar and philosopher Pythagoras decided to try to make things easier for everyone by standardizing, or at least dissecting, musical tuning. He had already discovered pitch frequencies in musical instruments by vibrating different lengths of string, and he had defined what exactly an octave was, so he figured this was the next logical step and created something that is now called the Pythagorean Circle, which eventually led to the more common Circle of Fifths. Each of the 12 points around the circle was assigned a pitch value. This roughly corresponds to the present system of an octave with 12 half steps. So far, so good. In mathematical terms, the unit of measure used in his Circle is cents, with 1,200 cents equal to one octave. Each half step, then, is broken up into 100 cents. Western music theorists have since updated Pythagoras's Circle, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: The Circle of Fifths is a foundational tool in Western music theory. The creation and use of the Circle of Fifths is the very foundation of Western music theory. Along with all the technical things the Circle predicts, it's also your best friend in the world in deciphering key signatures on sight. It's just as essential in writing music because its clever design is very helpful in composing and harmonizing melodies, building chords, and moving to different keys within a composition. Just as Pythagoras had it, the Circle of Fifths is divided up into 12 stops, like the numbers on a clock. Each stop is actually the fifth pitch in the scale of the preceding stop, which is why it's called the Circle of Fifths. For example, the fifth pitch of the C scale is G. If you look at the Circle of Fifths in Figure 1, you'll see that G is the next letter to the right of C. If you keep going clockwise, you'll see that the fifth note of the G scale, D, is the next stop. And so on. The Circle of Fifths helps you figure out which sharps and flats occur in what key. The name of the key being played is the letter on the outside of the Circle. To figure out how many sharps are in each key, count clockwise from C at the top of the Circle. C major has a number value of 0, so that means it has no sharps. G has a value of 1, so it has one sharp. When you play the G major scale on the piano, you will find that you play only white keys until you come to the seventh interval and land on that one sharp: F sharp, in this case. D has two sharps, A has three, and so on around the Circle. The number value by each letter on the right-hand side of the Circle represents how many sharps are in that key. To determine the number of flats in a key, go through the same process, but count counterclockwise. The key of E-flat major, therefore, has three flats. You can also use the Circle of Fifths to figure out the key signature for minor keys. Starting with the key you want to use, just move three spaces counterclockwise and use the key signature for that major key. For example, to figure out the key signature for E minor, find E on the Circle of Fifths and move three spaces counterclockwise, which lands you on G. This tells you that E minor uses the same key signature as G major. Major and minor keys that share a key signature are considered relatives. In this example, G is the relative major of E minor, and E is the relative minor of G major.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

The evolution of music theory and notation is almost more amazing than the evolution of human writing. When you really think about it, modern music notation is like Esperanto that lots of people can actually speak. People all over the Western world, and much of the Eastern world as well, know how to communicate with each other effectively through sheet music, chord theory, and the Circle of Fifths. Here are five music theorists who have helped define how musicians look at music or have changed the view of music entirely. Pythagoras: 582–507 B.C. Anybody who's ever taken a geometry class has heard of Pythagoras. Obsessed with the idea that everything in the world could be broken down into a mathematical formula, and that numbers themselves were the ultimate reality, Pythagoras came up with equations that could theoretically calculate everything from determining the size of a mountain by measuring its shadow to his famous Pythagorean Theorem. According to legend, Pythagoras took a piece of string from a lyre (the most popular instrument of the day), plucked it, measured its tone and vibration rate, and then cut that string in half and made a new set of measurements. He named the difference between the rate of vibration of the first length of string and the second an octave, then went to work breaking the octave up into 12 evenly divided units, with each unit equal to 100 "cents." Every point around his Pythagorean Circle (which would evolve into the Circle of Fifths) was assigned a pitch value, with each pitch exactly 1/12 octave higher or lower than the note next to it. Pythagoras' circle wasn't perfect, at least to a musician's ears, and for the next 2000 years, musicians and theorists concentrated on "tempering" this circle, with its 12 spots and shapes left intact, but creating a circle that was much more musician- and audience-friendly. Nicola Vicentino: 1511–1576 Nicola Vicentino was an Italian music theorist of the Renaissance period whose experiments with keyboard design and equal-temperament tuning rival those of many 20th-century theorists. He served briefly as a music tutor for the Duke of Este to support himself while writing treatises on the relevance of ancient Greek music theory in contemporary music, and why, in his opinion, the whole Pythagorean system could be thrown out the window. He was both adored and reviled by contemporaries for his disdain for the diatonic (12-tone) system and was invited to speak at international music conferences on his beliefs. Vicentino amazed the music world even more when, to further prove the inadequacies of the diatonic scale, he designed and built his own microtonal keyboard that matched a music scale of his own devising, called the archicembalo. On the archicembalo, each octave contained 36 keys, making it possible to play acoustically satisfactory intervals in any key — predating the well-tempered meantone keyboard in use today by nearly 200 years. Unfortunately, he built only a few of the instruments, and before his work could catch on, he died of the plague. Harry Partch: 1901–1974 At age 29, Harry Partch gathered up 14 years of music he had written, based on what he called the "tyranny of the piano" and the 12-tone scale, and burned it all in a big iron stove. He devoted the next four-and-a-half decades to producing sounds found only in microtonal scales — the tones found between the notes sounded by the piano keys. By the time he died in 1974, he had built around 30 instruments and had devised complex theories of intonation and performances to accompany them, including a 46-tone scale, with which he built most of his compositions. Karlheinz Stockhausen: 1928–2007 Karlheinz Stockhausen's greatest influence as a theorist can best be felt in the genres of music that came directly out of his teachings. During the 1950s, he helped develop the genres of minimalism and serialism. Much of the 1970s "krautrock" scene was created by his former students at the National Conservatory of Cologne, Germany, while his teachings and compositions greatly influenced the musical renaissance of 1970s West Berlin (notable characters include David Bowie and Brian Eno). In the long run, Stockhausen can be seen as the father of ambient music and the concept of variable form, in which the performance space and the instrumentalists themselves are considered part of the composition, and changing even one element of a performance changes the entire performance. Stockhausen is also responsible for polyvalent form music, in which a piece of music can be read upside-down, from left to right or right to left, or, if multiple pages are incorporated, the pages can be played in any order the performer wishes. Robert Moog: 1934–2005 Although no one really knows who built the first fretted guitar, or who truly designed the first real keyboard, we do know who created the first pitch-proper, commercially available synthesizer. Robert Moog is widely recognized as the father of the synthesizer keyboard, and his instrument revolutionized the sound of pop and classical music from the day it hit the streets in 1966. Unfortunately, Moog wasn't the greatest businessperson — or perhaps he was just very, very generous with his ideas — and the only synthesizer-related patent he ever filed was for something called a low-pass filter. When he first began building synthesizers, his goal was to create a musical instrument that played sounds completely different from any instrument that came before. However, as people began to use synthesizers to re-create "real" instrument sounds (putting some musicians out of business), he became disillusioned with the instrument and decided that the only way to get people to work with the "new" sounds was to break away from the antiquated keyboard interface altogether. His North Carolina-based company, Big Briar, began working on Leon Theremin's theremin design to create a MIDI theremin, which was designed to eliminate the interval steps between each note but still keep the tonal color of each individual instrument's MIDI patch.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

If you were to break music down into pure mathematics, you would end up dealing with acoustics and harmonics. An instrument's acoustics and harmonics define that instrument's unique sound; they're also the reason you rarely hear songs that use a tuba or a bassoon for the lead instrument. The following paragraphs give you a little of the music theory behind acoustics and harmonics. Harmonics Any sound, not matter what the source, is caused by something vibrating. Without vibration, there can be no sound. These vibrations cause the air particles next to the source to vibrate, and those air particles, in turn, cause the particles next to them to vibrate, and so on and so on, creating a sound wave. Just like a wave in water, the farther out the sound wave moves, the weaker it gets, until it completely dissipates. If the original vibration creates a strong enough wave, though, it eventually reaches your ears and registers as a sound. You hear a sound because air vibrates against your eardrums, causing them to vibrate also. These vibrations are analyzed by your brain and registered as music, traffic, birds singing — whatever. Each complete vibration of a sound wave is called a cycle. The number of cycles completed in one second is called the frequency of the vibration. One of the most noticeable differences between two sounds is the difference in pitch; it's the frequency of a sound that mostly determines its pitch. Frequency is measured in hertz, with one hertz (Hz) being one cycle per second. One thousand hertz is called a kilohertz and is written as 1 kHz. A high-frequency vibration produces a high-pitched note; a low-frequency vibration gives a low-pitched note. The human hearing range (audible range) is about 16Hz to 16kHz. The frequencies of notes that can be played on a piano range from 27.5 Hz to just over 4kHz. The musical note produced by a tuning fork is called a pure tone because it consists of one tone sounding at just one frequency. Instruments get their specific sounds — their timbre — because their sound comes from many different tones all sounding together at different frequencies. A single note played on a piano, for example, actually consists of several tones all sounding together at slightly different frequencies. Acoustics Next time you go out to see an orchestra or a big band play, or even when you watch one of those late-night show bands perform on TV, take a look at where the performers are sitting in relation to each other. Especially pay attention to which instrument is the "lead" instrument. You should notice two things. First of all, especially in an orchestral setting, all the performers playing the same instruments sit together. This isn't because they all have to share the same piece of sheet music; it's because when you stick two violins or flutes or clarinets together, they sound louder and fuller. Stick ten of them together, and you have a wall of sound coming at you from that area of the orchestra. Secondly, notice that the lead instruments are in front of all the other instruments, especially in acoustic performances. This is because of volume and perception: the sound waves from the instruments in the front of the orchestra pit will be heard a microsecond before the rest of the orchestra and will therefore be perceived as being louder than the other instruments. This principle applies to a regular four-piece band setting, too. If you want your singer to be heard above the guitars, make sure the amplifier carrying his or her voice is placed closer to the audience than the guitar and bass amp.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Key signatures are important when reading music. You must understand how to read key signatures in order to know how to play the notes the way the composer intended. The key signature is a grouping of symbols (sharps [#] and flats [b]) that tell you to always play certain notes one semitone (half-step) higher or lower. The key signature is typically placed after the clef at the beginning of the music or after a double bar. To better understand how to read key signatures, take another look at the circle of fifths. Circle of fifths shows the major keys on the outside of the circle and the minor keys on the inside of the circle. To figure out how many sharps are in each key signature, count clockwise on the Circle of Fifths from C major. The number of sharps in each successive key goes up by one in that key’s key signature. So, if there is one sharp in the key signature, then move one “stop” from C Major, which gets you to G major (or e minor); if there are two sharps in the key signature, move two stops away from C, landing you at D major (or b minor). Therefore, to play a song in the key of B major — five stops away from C major on the circle — you know there will be five sharps in that key. The sharps are arranged on the key signature going “up.” Therefore, to play a song in the key of B major — five stops away from C major on the circle of fifths — you know there will be five sharps in that key. Sharps appear in a specific order as you go around the Circle clockwise: F#, C#, G#, D#, A#, E#, and B# (remember: Fat Cats Go Down Alleys Eating Birds). For major scales that have flats, you go counter-clockwise around the circle of fifths. The flats appear in a specific order in every key as you go around the circle counter-clockwise: Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, Cb, and Fb (remember: Battle Ends, And Down Goes Charles’ Father). Therefore, if the key signature shows one flat (Bb), you would move counter-clockwise one stop away from C major, landing you at F major (or d minor). The flats are arranged on the key signature going “down.” So, for example, Gb, which is six steps away from C major on the circle, has six flats in its key signature. Recalling your mnemonic (Battle Ends, And Down Goes Charles's Father), you know that those flats are Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, and Cb. Bb major, which is two steps away, has two flats, and now you know those flats have to be Bb and Eb.