Reading Music

1. Reading Music The Basics

2. How to Read Music • In this lesson we will be looking at how to read some simple music notation. • To read music all we need to do is learn some basic rules and music symbols. • By the end of the lesson, you should be able to read a simple piece of melodic music on your own.

3. The Basics What do we write music on? Manuscript paper

4. What do we see on the manuscript paper? A Stave

5. What does the stave have? AClef 5 Lines

6. Mini Task 1

7. On your manuscript -Practice writing some Treble Clefs Compare yours with your classmates to see who has the neatest clefs!

8. What does a Clef tell us? The clef that we see at the beginning of a piece of music tells us what range we are playing in – low, mid or high.

9. There are lots of different clefs but we are just going to look at the most common clef – the Treble Clef. This Treble Clef – tells us we are playing in a mid/high range. The right hand on a piano will most often be playing in this range.

10. Middle C Middle C is a very important note – you must know where to find it on the piano and stave.

11. Now we know where Middle C is – we can begin to find other notes. C B A G F E D C

12. Mini Task 2

13. Write in the notes on the stave which are written underneath B D F G D – E – A Melodic E – G – B Harmonic

14. Review On what do we write music? Manuscript Paper What do we see on the Manuscript? A Stave and a clef What does the clef tell us? In what range the notes will be

15. Melody in C 5 bars 4/4 Time signature All ¼ notes (except the last bar)

16. Mini Task 3Practice the melody that will be handed out to you. If you can, add a chord accompaniment to it and write the names of the chords above the stave. Write some words to go with the lyrics and write them underneath the melody notes. Extension Work

17. Main Task Write an 8 bar melody on the paper provided. You can use whole, ½, ¼ , 1/8 & 16th notes Focus on the white notes but you can also use some # & b notes if you like.

19. Steps and Leaps Now we have finished our melodies, be can begin to think about the way the melody moves. Melodies will either move by step or by leap orboth. In music we call this Conjunct (by step) or Disjunct (by leap).

20. Steps (Conjunct melody) will move to either the note above or below to make the melody and will continue to move like this throughout. The first melody we learned together as a class was a good example.

21. Leaps (Disjunct melody) will move to notes that are higher than a step up and down the scale. Look at the first two notes, the leap is from C to a G.

22. Melody Shape Lets think a bit about the shape of melodies. Melodies are built from a combination of ascending and descending motions. What is the shape of this melody?

23. Melody Shape Task Look at the three melody shapes on the next slide and write out a 12 note melody that reflects the melodic shape you can see. *Use C as a starting note.

24. 1 2 3

25. Parallel Harmony • After we have played a single melody line during • a piece of music- how could we then develop it • to give it some variation? Once we have written a basic melody line – we can then think about harmonising it.

26. Parallel Harmony • Above is an example of what a melody in parallel harmony would look like. • 2 notes moving in the same way through the melody.

27. A Single Note Melody Line A Parallel Harmony Melody Line