The arrangement of notes on the stave

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The stave is essentially a universal language, a way of conveying information that is understandable to every musician, regardless of age, nationality and other factors that separate people in the world.

This language does not even depend on time - music recorded on paper centuries ago sounds the same today as it did at the moment of its birth. The musical staff made such a miracle possible. With notes as letters, clefs, sharps and flats as punctuation marks, musical notation is even more perfect than usual, as it conveys not only informational content, but also emotional undertones.

What is fixed on the mill?

It would seem that the answer to this question is simple: music. However, everything is somewhat more complicated. Each sound, both musical and any other, is characterized by certain parameters, and it is them that the stave fixes.

Sounds have four main characteristics:

• height;
• volume;
• duration;
• emotional coloring, that is, timbre.

Each of these characteristics is conveyed by the stave. With notes arranged along lines, everything is more or less clear, but they are not able to reflect the full picture of the sound without other signs. That is, continuing the analogy with a simple letter, the notes play the role of letters, and the rest of the signs complement them. Together they make up musical phrases similar to recorded speech sentences.

Pitch

There is a system, that is, a scale to which the arrangement of notes is subordinated. On the stave, this is the order from the bottom to the top. In keyboard instruments, sounds are arranged from left to right. That is, the very first key on the left transmits the lowest sound, and on the right - the highest. The same principle is the basis of musical literacy. The lowest lines available on the stave represent the lowest pitched sound.

Additionally, the scale is subdivided into octaves, there are only nine of them. The "bass" stave includes four octaves:

• sub-contral;
• contral;
• large;
• small.

They were distributed according to the pitch, starting from the lowest. After the bass octaves come the rest, called numerals, from the first to the fifth.

How are notes displayed?

The pitch determines the order, the location of the notes. On the stave, in the eyes of a beginner in music or simply a person far from it, there are a lot of ovals, shaded and transparent, with and without sticks, with tails, lines and other strange"squiggles". This is what children usually say when they open music books for the first time.

The notes themselves are written in ovals, either empty or shaded. The sticks added to them are called "calm" and can be placed to the left or right of the oval. The stem going down is written on the left, going up from the musical oval - on the right.

The position of the calm is subject to the rule of writing musical phrases, that is, it is actually spelling, but musical - up to the third line is written on the right side, after it - on the left.

Calms sometimes "decorate ponytails". They are called flags.

The sound that a note corresponds to has a duration. In writing, it is transmitted by the presence of shading and calm. For the convenience of transferring this parameter, the whole sound is considered to consist of parts of one quarter.

An empty and "thick" note without a "stick" means a duration of a whole quarter or 4 full beats. Exactly the same, but with a calm conveys the duration in 2 full beats or half a whole quarter. A shaded note with a calm, as the performers say, is “small”, it is a quarter note, that is, its duration is 1 beat.

How many lines are on the mill?

The stave consists of five lines. The height of the sounds fixed on the lines is indicated by a key and additional signs, it is guided by them that the musician understands which octave is selected in a particular recording.

When a "musical sentence" uses a sound that is below or above the selected octave, this is indicated by additional shortened lines, on which the note ovals "sit down".

If there is no key, it is a priori considered that the lines reflect the sounds of the first octave.

What is a key?

The stave's keys don't just complement. This is the main element of the recording, a kind of starting point, the point from which the pitch of the displayed sound begins.

It is from the key that every musician starts reading, without them it is impossible to determine the exact range of sound, only an approximate one.

What are the keys?

Newcomers to music usually name two clefs - treble and bass. There are actually many more.

All the keys used in recording music can be divided into three large groups, named according to the notes:

• "S alt" is the first.
• "F" is the second one.
• "Before" - third.

These bands are not named like that at all by chance, they are oriented by notes.

First group

The keys of the Old French and violin staves are determined by the "sol". If there are no additional clarifications, then the entry refers to the first octave.

Second group

Baritone, bassoprofund and, of course, the bass clef, the stave is oriented to "fa". In the absence of any additional explanations, they refer the musician to a small octave when reading the scale.

Third group

The keys belonging to this group, that is, all the rest, orient the stave of the piano and other instruments to the "C" of the first octave. This group of keys is used in complex pieces that are already learned by experienced musicians. Beginners master works with two types of keys - "bass"and "violin".

Is there a recording type for multiple musicians?

This question is always interesting for everyone who starts to study music. Indeed, if a work is not intended for only one instrument, how is it recorded? Really, for example, when an orchestra performs, each speaker has the same sheet of music? But if there are several of the same violins on stage? Do they make the same sounds? Almost every music teacher hears a cascade of similar questions.

Music sheets addressed to several performers are combined into a collection called a score. Inside the scores, there are separate notes for each of the participating instruments, including human voices. Such extracts are called batches.

When arranging a work “in one sheet”, each part is a separate five-foot line, the score is indicated by a straight vertical line located in front of the keys and the unifying part.

The way to write that the parts of different instruments, like voices, must be played at the same time, is a curly bracket, similar to that used in arithmetic. Here it is called an accolade.

Where this name came from, no philologist can say for sure. There is a version that the word is shortened from the combination of "chord" and "mode". That is, this term was given to musical notation not by keyboard instruments, but by string instruments. Maybe that's the way it is.

The end of a separate score is written on paper with a double vertical line, one part of which is bolder than the other.

Besides, in such recordings, a sign called "reprise" is used. These are two points located at the lines indicating the final of the musical passage. The presence of a repeat tells the performers to repeat what they have played.

What else can you see in the camp?

Learning textbook exercises, everyone always looks at the end of the textbook and encounters there a dotted linear tap of several notes, supplemented by such a designation "8va". Such an abbreviation is written on top, and “8vb” on the bottom.

Reviewing such a record, those who have just begun to master the "sounding letter" once again feel like complete ignoramuses. What kind of versions of what this could mean, teachers do not hear. In fact, everything is extremely simple and visually clear. This dotted line is a simple reference to a lower or, conversely, a higher octave. The sign is used to simplify musical notation, that is, in order not to draw a large number of additional short lines.

How is tonality written?

In addition to the fact that the staves reflect the pitch and are arranged according to its order, they also inform about the keys in which the work should be performed.

In addition to octaves, all sounds denoted by seven notes are also divided into sound steps. It is easy to find them on the instrument - these are black short keys.

Short keyto the right of the note gives an increase in its pure sound, and to the left - a decrease. That is, the same black short key "serves" two notes at the same time. For example, raises the F or lowers the G.

This is spelled out in writing using special characters: "sharp", indicating the need to increase, and "flat", indicating that the tone of the sound should be lowered.

There is a concept of "double". If a pure symbol indicates a half tone, then a duplicate symbol indicates a whole one.

Besides them, there is a symbol called "bekar". This sign completely cancels the semitones and tells the performer that in this passage the sound should be primary, that is, pure.

The use of all three signs that communicate the nuances of tone is called alteration.

In addition to all of the above, other symbols are used in the stave to convey additional information to the performer about how the work should be played. These are the symbols of minor and major, pauses and accelerations and many others.

A stave is comparable to a speech recording. Having begun to study it, they first comprehend the main points, such as the meanings of notes and their location, this is similar to the stage of memorizing and mastering the writing of letters. Then the symbols are studied, this stage is similar to the development of punctuation marks.

The stave only seems complicated, but in fact it is easy to learn if you follow the order in its development.