The Pipe Organ: Controlling the Sound

Hello, I’m Ginny Moe, this is Adam Sullivan's Music Theory Blog and you're listening to an episode of  The Pipe Organ: its development and design. 



Last month's episode was on the basic two types of pipes: how they work and how they sound. You can access again it online anytime. This month's episode is on how the organist controls which pipes actually sound at any given moment. 

Pipe organs makes sound when air goes to pipes, so we start with the blower, which sends air to a windchest which is attached to every pipe, with most pipes actually sitting right on top. When one pipe is played it doesn't take much air but when many pipes are played at once it takes a lot of air, reducing the air pressure. So the blower sends air to the windchest through a reservoir, which keeps the air at a constant pressure whether one or 100 pipes are sounding. If you look down on the top of the windchest, you can tell it's not just a big balloon with a lot of pipes sticking out haphazardly. The pipes are arranged in rows and columns, with the toe of any pipe fitting into a hole on the windchest through which wind enters the pipe.

Each column on the chest holds a rank, which is a set of pipes of matching design and sound. Each rank has one pipe for each note, and ranks are usually arranged in order on the chest from the lowest and longest pipes at one end to the shortest and highest at the other end. Two ranks of pipes require two columns and two pipes for each note, three ranks require three columns and three pipes, and so on. The rows on the chest correspond to the notes. Each row holds all the pipes which sound a certain note.

On the sides and ends of the windchest are several kinds of machinery controlling tubes of air inside the chest which allow routing of air to various pipes. These controllers are adjusted through linkages to the console, where the organist sits directing air traffic in the windchest.

Modern consoles normally have one pedalboard and several manual keyboards. The pedalboard has 32 keys, arranged like piano keys but bigger, for your feet, the lowest key being two octaves below middle C, the highest the G above middle C. Each manual keyboard has five octaves, starting at the C two octaves below middle C and going up 61 notes to the C three octaves above middle C. In addition, the console has stops, usually on the sides of the manuals, but sometimes above the top manual. And most organs have pistons, which are little buttons below the keyboard and knobs down by the pedals for the feet to play.

Now how does this console give signals to the windchest?

Stops control a channel of air under a rank of pipes. When a stop is engaged, or pulled, by the organist, air flows into the channel and is available for all the pipes in the rank above the channel. If two stops are pulled, air flows into two channels, three stops pulled and air flows into three channels. If many stops are connected to a keyboard, the channels will be dispersed in columns over several windchests for ease maintenance.

Keys control the rows of the windchest, and every pipe designed to sound the note corresponding to a key is in the the entire row controlled by that key. When a key is pressed, pouches under the pipes in the row open, and if air is in a channel under any pipe, the air is released into a pipe sounding a note.
So, for example, a windchest with eight ranks has eight columns corresponding to eight stops on the console, and on manual windchests, it has sixty-one rows corresponding to the sixty-one keys on the manual keyboard, for a total of 488 pipes. When one stop is pulled, and the organist plays one key, the windchest is signaled to send wind to one rank, and one row. Wind is released to the pipe at the intersection of that column and row, and the one pipe sounds. When two keys are played, two pipes get wind, three keys winds three pipes. If another stop is pulled, another channel of air is available, and one key sounds two pipes, one in each rank, the same note, but different in tone quality. Playing two keys sounds two pipes in each rank, playing three keys sounds three pipes in each rank, for a total of six pipes. 

The third main control type on the console, ubiquitous in modern pipe organs, is combination action. Most often it is entirely at the console, for it signals several stops to engage (or disengage) simultaneously. Combinations are activated by pressing the pistons underneath the manuals or near the pedals.

To summarize, in a pipe organ, the blower sends air through a reservoir to the windchest. Pipes sit on the chest arranged in columns of ranks and rows of notes. Organists control which pipes sound by sending signals from a console to the windchest. The majority of these signals are of three types: Keys, controlling rows of notes; Stops, controlling columns of ranks, and Pistons, controlling combinations of stops.

That’s all for this episode, I'm Ginny Moe, and this is Adam Sullivan's Music Theory Blog. Thanks to Adam for hosting this series, The Pipe Organ: its development and design. I hope you’ll check in again next month, when we’ll begin looking at how the sound and design of the pipe organ developed throughout history.

That’s all for this episode. I hope you’ll check in again next month, when we’ll begin looking at how the sound and design of the pipe organ developed throughout history. I'm Ginny Moe, and this is Adam Sullivan's Music Theory Blog (sulliadm.blogspot.com). Thanks to Adam for hosting this series, The Pipe Organ: its development and design.

The Pipe Organ: Development and Design

Written by: Ginny Moe



The design and music of the pipe organ are a result of its history  as builders responded to changing societal needs but more importantly  as organists, composers, and organ builders  learned to take advantage of developments in science  and industrial techniques. This session is on the two main types of pipes and how they speak,  or make sound.

At its most basic the pipe organ is a set of pipes  similar to flutes or clarinets through which wind blows to make sound usually musical sound and which, in the modern organ, is controlled by an organist who plays a keyboard shaped like a piano keyboard.

Almost all pipes on the modern organ are of two types. Flue pipes comprise the majority of the pipes, and they are almost always made of either metal or wood with a foot through which air flows into the pipe. Most organs also use reeds (sometimes called reed pipes) in which the speaking mechanism is covered by a boot into which air flows, vibrating a tongue. As an example, I currently play a pipe organ which has 17 sets (ranks) of flue pipes and 4 ranks of reeds, plus some extras which combine several ranks of flue stops.

Now the sounding mechanism of these two types pipes is very different. In the flue pipe air enters the foot of the pipe through a toe and is directed toward the mouth of the pipe by a languid. Air goes outside the pipe at the mouth, and the the speedy air outside the pipe reduces air pressure inside the pipe, drawing the airstream into the pipe. This is the Bernoulli effect in practice; the same reason jets can fly. IT IS THE AIR ITSELF WHICH VIBRATES, setting up sound waves.

By contrast, in the reed pipe a shallot extends into the boot. An aperture in the shallot is covered by a tongue. The boot surrounds this mechanism, and air enters the boot through a toe in the bottom. The wind presses the tongue against the shallot, and the tongues bends to cover the the aperture. The tongue springs back, allowing the wind to enter the shallot, and again the Bernoulli effect is observed, and sound is produced by the vibrating tongue. Here, IT IS THE TONGUE, OR REED ITSELF, WHICH VIBRATES.

Since the wind itself makes the sound in flue pipes, the pipe, which shapes the trajectory of the wind, directly affects the sound, and the most noticeable difference is made by the width of the pipe. Very narrow pipes generally produce more overtones, like bowed string instruments, and are called string pipes. Very fat pipes generally produce fewer overtones, like flutes, and are called flute pipes. And the most important pipes in any organ are the medium width flue pipes, called diapasons or principals. Various modifications around the mouth of the pipe also change the sound. The number of strings, diapasons, and flutes varies, but as an example, my current instrument has three independent string ranks, six independent flute ranks, and seven independent diapason ranks.

The reeds make a very distinctive sound, but most of them sound more like each other than they sound like any flue pipe. Usually they are louder, and the variation in sound is mostly caused by different shaped and length tongues and apertures in the shallot. What are often called reed pipes are properly referred to as resonators, and they amplify and change the sound. They are designed in many inventive and sometimes bizarre shapes, some of which make a difference in the sound quality, or timbre.

To summarize, organ pipes are normally either flue or reed pipes. In flue pipes, the air vibrates, and in reeds, the tongue vibrates. Most organ pipes are flues, and the length and shape of the pipe make changes in timbre, or sound quality. The most important pipes are the principals, or diapasons, and if you think of the sound of a pipe organ, you are probably thinking of the sound of the diapasons. They are of medium width, and the narrow pipes are called string pipes, while the fatter pipes are called flute pipes. A few reeds are usually part of a pipe organ, providing distinctive solo stops and fiery color. In them the sounding mechanism is covered by a boot, inside of which a tongue vibrates against a shallot to produce sound, which is then shaped modified by a resonator.

Check in again next month, when the subject will be organ keys, and various ways the keys control the pipework. I am Ginny Moe, and this is a series on The Pipe Organ, and how its design developed throughout history.
Twitter: @GinnyMoeRHSCwebsite: GinnyMoe.net

Review: Magic Rosin® X

Recently, between being swamped by end of the year school stuff (juries, exams, etc.), I needed to take a small break from the site in order to make sure that I was not overwhelmed with work. However, over the next couple of days I am going to upload a series of reviews that I have taken way too long to perform. Some are because of testing reasons, and others are from simply having too much work and not being able to write them. I am planning on bringing this website into its own thing in the semi-near future but first comes school and my jobs/internships. Now that I have a small staff of writers, editors and a web manager I hope to start making content more consistent but I will need everyone's help. If you have not subscribed to my newsletter then we are starting our own next month. Feedburner has completely dropped the ball on us, so we have decided to start anew. Email "Newsletter" to Sulliadm2@gmail.com and we will add you to our new custom made newsletter. It will be once the month and will be easier to read than spamming every post to you after being posted. I will be updating the site soon so anyone who wants to pass by and join can. Anyways, on to the review!

Today is the first day of my review mayhem. As stated above, I've had a lot on my plate the past few months and over the next couple of days, I will be releasing reviews of products that should have been reviewed before now. On this review, we have Magic Rosin® X! Those whom have been following me for a few years now know that Sarah West (creator of Magic Rosin®) and I have gotten to become great friends as I have continuously reviewed her rosins. Just before she released her newest rosin, she asked if I would review it for her. How could I refuse? Free sample of the next step in her company and being one of the first to test it… I was ecstatic and I still am. However, there is a reason to why this review took as long as it did. I felt obligated to test, and retest and retest this rosin over the past 3 months so I could make sure I was saying something that could be considered an accurate review. I think I finally found a way to express my opinion effectively and clearly.

Just as a heads up, I know this review will sound very negative but it should not be taken that way. A large part of this review went into testing the major difference between this rosin and Magic Rosin®'s 3G and 3G Ultra formulas. If you have never used any other Magic Rosin® rosin, then click to check out my 3G review or the 3G Ultra review but the basic premise is the brand is made for all instruments. This rosin has kept the same quality and distinctive feel that many have learned to grow attached to but with some changes. They all are very smooth and crisp rosins and work fairly well on all instruments. 3G formula has more than enough bite for the higher strings while not making it sound crunchy but tends to be a weaker rosin for cello let alone bass. 3G Ultra has a better amount of bite for cello while not overdoing it for violins and violas. The problem that some have seen is it is not strong enough, and that is what the majority of this review will be centered around.

The first thing that was noticeable about this rosin was the claims on the site and from Miss West herself. As stated on the website, “At long last,after much research and development, we are very pleased to introduce MagicRosin® X, the grippiest Magic Rosin® formula.” When they say it is the grippiest, they really mean it! This is probably the strongest rosin I have ever used on my bow. This leads me to the first, and only serious complaint I have against the rosin: It might be too strong for anything outside bass. Personally, I use either Magic Rosin® 3G Ultra or Jade, depending on what I have near me. Jade is something that I see as being a too weak, while Magic Rosin® 3G Ultra is exactly what I like. The new X formula is roughly twice as sticky as the Ultra. There’s nothing wrong with that if you want more bite but personally I want a rosin that is a mix between sticking to the strings and fluidity. A strong opinion to hold but this is the reason I had to tested it so much.

In my initial test, I used my student Brazilwood bow. On this bow, it was simply too thick. I could not move the bow without crunching everything and anything I attempted. There was a flaw in this test: I was using a balding bow. It was roughly ¼” of hair, and some were black hairs. Following the basic principle of physics, the more surface area an object has to contact another then the pressure and energy from that one area would be dispersed more and thus grabs the string. However the less hair, then the same amount of energy would have to be disperse over a smaller area, causing less stability and more energy to be released over a smaller area. This means that I could not effectively test the rosin on that bow without rehairing or purchase a new bow. This lead me onto my next test: Testing on new bows. I had been planning on upgrading bows for some time so ordering them was not out of my way. Using fresh bows from World of Bow (review of the company will be available by clicking here when online), I rosined them with the Magic Rosin® X and tested them. I cleaned the strings with some bow tonic, rosined the bow and played for a bit. It felt really thick to me, sticking to the strings about the same as before. The only error I can come up with in this test was the rosin being to “fresh” on the bow and not really in the bow hairs, but I believe the coating of rosin on the strings would theoretically counter this but I will note it for later research. The biggest evidence came to me whenever I did my final test.

I decided after the first test that I should see how the target market would react to the rosin. This lead back to the high school I used in my previous tests on. I borrowed 4 bass players and 6 cellist in order to test if my theory was correct to an interesting surprise. The cellist loved the new rosin as much or more than the 3G ultra, which is what the teacher uses in his classroom. They applauded the stronger grip on the string but for them wasn’t sacrificing in terms of quality sound. From my point of view (that being the listener of this test) it came off as a stronger bite but not really any clearer quality sound. To me it sounded like it was a grittier but not enough to be noticed by the students. Plus in their minds, at least from what I’ve gathered from coaching most of them for 2-3 years now, louder equals better as long as it does not cause a distorted effect. This is not always the case but if you are into that sound then this is the rosin for you. There is one more thing I need to touch on however.

Something that I also tested was how this new rosin would compare to other bass rosins. Something that was explained to me from various teachers in South Carolina String Educators Association was they felt like the 3G Ultra was great for Violin, Viola and Cello but was simply too weak for bass. The initial testing I did of the rosin (which you can see by clicking here) shows that the students I used then felt the same way. They feel like the quality is there, but the grip was not enough to cause the strings to vibrate effectively. After noticing there was a lot more grip to this rosin, I compared it to two other bass rosins that are standards in their field: Pops and Carlson. They are on two opposite sides of the world in terms of rosin. Pops is a strong rosin that can become gritty at times but is more stable and can really pull the lower end out of the bass when needed. Carlson, on the other hand, is an equally strong rosin but can achieve a similar strength sound without the gritty sound. The cost is the lack of stability from the rosin’s formula. It can be very temperamental in higher humidity and that causes the rosin to not stick very well or in some rare cases stick too much.

The reason I bring all this out is the results from this test. The Magic Rosin® X came out literally in the middle for all the bass players. They all called it the happy medium between the two rosins. It was sticky enough to cause the clear and concise sound that Magic Rosin® is known for but without the cost of being temperamental or being too strong. Whenever I fiddled around with the rosin samples on one of the basses, I noticed the same thing. It was clear and worked well but fit as a natural middle ground between the two other rosins. As far as I’ve noticed, the rosin seems to be very stable and if it is like the other Magic Rosin® types then it should be very stable.

With everything else said, there is one more thing I need to get out of the way before I give my final verdict. This sample of the rosin is very flaky. I do not know if it is from the sample or the recipe but it chips a lot easier than the others have. Not enough to cause it to shatter from bumping it with the frog but if you have used the other rosins then it will be noticeable.

Other than that complaint and the bulk of this review, it is a great rosin. Magic Rosin® has kept their quality up high when creating this product. It has all the signature qualities: the clear rosin with the beautiful images inside, the lack of dust that makes it very friendly to those with asthma or allergies and the longevity of the rosin for the amount. The only thing that should be considered before trying it yourself is if you like strong rosin. For those who have used the 3G Ultra and would like something stronger then this would be worth trying. If you are a bass player looking for a good middle rosin between the previously mentioned then this would be a great place to start. I give Magic Rosin® X a 3 chunks of rosin out of 5 for cello and a 4 chunks of rosin out of 5 for bass. 

Music Theory 101 #7: The Basic Skills of Music; Timbre

Ok, no more playing around! I will finish this post today. I've been busy with the convention, and being sick but today is the day I finish this post and get to finishing the series for the new one I have planned!

Continuing on from where we left off way too long ago, we shall talk about timbre, or more commonly called tone color. Timbre (pronouced tam-ber) is basically the characteristics that make any instrument sound the way it does. Think about it as if this would be the instrument's accent. Every language we speak has an accent to where it was created, and there is no difference with musical instruments. The major difference here is the science behind why it happens.


Looking on to why this happens, we have to get some what technical about how it works. The basic explanation is the sound wave itself has changed shapes, which then changes how we hear it. Think about the differences between the four basic sound waves: Sine/Cosine, Square, Triangle and Sawtooth. Each one has their own definite shape and sound very different. There is A LOT that is involved into explaining that, and if you are interested then click here to read what HyperPhysics.Edu have done on the topic. For those whom don't want all the details, there are two basics things to consider. The first way to analyze a sound wave is by analyzing the harmonic content of the sound, or how the overtones and harmonics are heard in relation to the primary sound wave. An organic sound wave (that being by a live instrument) is created by playing a primary frequency or fundamental pitch. That then triggers all the overtones, harmonics, and in the case of instruments with strings, similarly divided strings to play simultaneously. Sometimes these overtones and harmonics can be directly heard while other times aren't even recognizable. The second way is how the sound wave envelope is created. Every instruments has a certain way to make sound. For example, a cello normally has to bow a string. The energy to get started with the bow moving across the string helps define strings musicians because of the "lag" from the energy transfer. Compare to guitarist and pianist whom strike the string with their fingers, pick or by a hammer. The energy is transferred differently, and is creates a different sound. In case you are interested in hearing so, then check out this piece. It has played piano and bowed piano. 

After all the scientific gibberish followed by a crazy videos, what does this all mean for a simple composer? Why should timbre matter this much in my piece?

Because it can change to context of your piece extremely. The best example I think I've ever seen are these two videos: Both of a song called "Raining Blood" by Slayer. This first one is the studio version of the song by Slayer (in case the video doesn't do this automatically, skip to around 0:30 to avoid the intro)


Now let's show what happens when you go from electric guitar to another guitar-like instrument and play the same song:


The differences are really staggering here. This is a bit of an extreme juxtaposition of the song but it does show what is possible. Another example I like to share (that is a little more socially accepted) is orchestrated version of Stairway to Heaven. This one is by Triple Door Cello Quartet


Finally, let's look at one from a classical example. While this isn't the best example I can think of, this one combines the past topics to express itself.


If you would like another example, listen to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. He does a lot of things in terms of building timbres up and pushing the limits of the instruments and musicians. I hope this was worth the wait! I am really sorry about the delay on this one but between the convention (which I will share the videos once they're available to me) and being sick, I was loaded down. However, once we finish this series and then go into our next series: Explaining how all these topics and more convert into composing. Perhaps even some workshop like episodes and analysis. Also, if anyone is interested in listening to me break down music books and explain them differently then let me know! Thanks for reading!

Major Announcement and Interview with @Kidstruments

Hello everyone! Sorry about the lack of posts lately but between Faith's getting married in the next couple of weeks and I've been setting up for a new series plus running Team Young Spark as we head towards our first couple of major events... Life's been a little overwhelming. But seeing there has been 90+ views on the "Music Theory 101" series thus far, I think it's safe to assume that I will finish this season of it. The next series I'm going to do is a tutorial series on using and making the most out of Audacity. While it isn't the best program to do a lot of complicated audio manipulation, people underestimate its potential. By the time the series begins to trickle out, I should have released an animation project I've been working on with my friend Benjamin and everything audio related has been mixed and mastered in Audacity. Also, I want to revisit the Finale Tutorials but teach over 2014 this time.The original series had such a positive reception that I wouldn't imagine not doing it but I need to save up for 2014. Leave a comment if you would like to see more of them (and they will be actual lessons this time, not randomly teaching tools!)

The first major announcement is that I've been accepted as a panelist for Derpy Con South as my alias Harmonic Inferno, and I will be giving 2 lectures: One on the series I've been working on here (Music Theory 101) and the other an open discussion on arts activism. I wanted to make sure that if anyone here was interested in coming out to the convention and hearing them that you were aware in advance. The other thing I wanted to announce was Faith will be getting married in the near future. I mentioned it briefly before, but I wanted to make sure I gave her a major congratulations for her milestone with her fiance but for all the help she's done in building this site back up. Now without further ado, let's get onto the interview!

Adam: Explain what Kidstruments Fund is? How was it started and how long has
it been around?

Kidstruments: Kidstruments Fund is an organization that helps kids play instruments in school band or orchestra. It was started when my 6th grade orchestra teacher's violin broke. It was very sentimental to her and I raised money to try to fix it. She did not take the money but in the process I learned that there are kids without the sufficient funds to rent an instrument. I had this money and nothing to do with it, so I used it to start Kidstruments. Kidstruments has been around for 3 months now [as of the time of this interview].

A: What all does Kidstruments Fund do to help/ benefit the music community?

K: Kidstruments helps the music community by helping others playing music, by expanding the community (in the future hopefully greatly) and making more people to play the music that other people write. Now, as for the normal community, it shows people that little people (grammar for the win) can make big impacts. It also helps more people enjoy music. It also helps kids in school, because for some, a love of music might be the thing that makes them like school and be a better student. 

A: What goals does your group have towards helping the music community at

large?

K: Our goal to the music community at large is to help more and more people not just play music, but write it, understand it, and enjoy it. We try to grow it and expand it. Kidstruments is trying greatly to expand music all over the world.

A: How can someone help your cause?

K: People can help by donating online at [http://kidstrumentsfund.org/donate/] or they can send a check to:

Kidstruments Fund Inc.9425 N. Meridian #201IndianapolisIN 46260They can also follow us on Twitter [@Kidstruments] or Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/Kidstruments]. Finally, and most important, if music people just told other music people about us, I think so many musicians would remember how important their school band or orchestra was to their life, and would want to help kids get the same opportunity. The younger kids, after all, are the musicians of tomorrow.

Music Theory 101 #6: The Basic Skills of Music; Dynamics

Hello everyone and welcome back to the next episode of Music Theory 101. Sorry about vanishing, but between the end of school, the trip/ meeting in Minneapolis and then getting two major plans set up (announcements ASAP) I literally had no time to keep working. This will be the end of the explanations and salutations though because we have a month’s worth of material to make up in this extended post!

Music Terms:

~Amplitude
~Dynamics
~Forte and Piano
~Mezzo
~Adding -issimo (fortissimo, pianissimo)
~Fortepiano and Pianoforte

Catching everyone back up to speed, we have gone through posting about the basics of music and have made our way through two of the six: Pitch and Rhythm. This time, we move onward to the next topic for discussion; dynamics. Dynamics are the musical equivalent to amplitude. For those in need of a quick refresher, amplitude is the expansion or contraction of the wave’s height causes the wave to have more or less force. This increase or decrease in power can cause our ears to perceive what we hear to be louder or softer. That’s honestly all there is to this one in terms of science and terminology. However, dynamics play a more important role in music.

Music’s emotional weight is primarily built off of dynamic control. It is true to the point of listening to movies. Think to the last movie you’ve seen and how the dynamics of the music played into each point that the scene was trying to make. For example, whenever there is a romantic scene and there is a couple talking, the music backs off but you can hear that they are playing. Once they start to kiss,  the music becomes really loud to show that emotion’s weight. The same can be argued for any kind of music. A classical example is “March of the Scaffolds” by Hector Berlioz. The beginning starts out low and quiet until the cellos and bass come in with the motif of the movement. Every time there is portrayed a horrifying moment or a moment of triumph in the movement then the horns play loud. Whenever the thought of his beloved come to him, then it is soft and tender. Modern music examples is the difference between a rock ballad and heavy metal. The difference between trance/chillstep and hard style/brostep. Dynamics control a lot in music.

Now that we know what it is and what they do, why not explain how they are in music. Before we begin however, it should be noted that they are very situational. None are defined by an absolute “loudness” like pitch and other things in music. Dynamics are based off their original words in Italian and use the first letter to represent the dynamic. Forte is considered to be “loud” and is shown by adding an italicized f. Piano is considered “soft” or quiet and is shown with an italicized p. Next thing to know about with dynamics is the mezzo range. Mezzo means medium and if it’s used as a prefix, it means either medium loud, mezzo forte or mf, or medium soft, mezzo piano or mp.

There are also extremes by adding more of each letter into the mix, getting fortissimo, ff and pianissimo, pp. When you add the -ssimo suffix; meaning very, you can create more extremes for your dynamic timeline. You can add more letters to mean more contrast, such as fffffffffff. Just be warned that the mentioning of relations of dynamics are meant to be taken. So don’t expect a cannon like sound from your instruments… Unless you use a cannon. The last thing related to dynamics I want to mention is the case of fortepianos. Fortepiano and it’s reverse pianoforte are used for extreme changes in dynamic that are meant to last temporarily. They are played as they are read. In the case of fortepianos, fp, they should be played loudly and then soft. The reverse is true for pianofortes, though they aren’t as commonly used.

There is one other dynamic term that I will go over during our next episode. I hope this extended post was worth the wait! Keep an eye out for announcements in the next day or two.

Music Theory 101 #5: The Basic Skills of Music; Rhythm: Pt. 2

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Music Theory 101 series on ASMTB! I hate that last week was a dud but I had a lot going on I had to take care of (mostly pertaining to updating the site soon!) and posting sort of slipped my mind. I am really sorry about that, but I hope this episode and the updates will make up for this little mishap!

Today's lesson is to continue talking about rhythm in comparison to the six basics of music. If you would like to follow along with the previous ones then I made a tab above (If you're reading this from the newsletter then head on over and show us some love). As I mentioned in the last post, duration is the length a pitch is produced. I failed to bring up that it is not strictly related to pitches, but can measure rests as well. Rests are something that are not commonly mentioned because they are simpler than pitches, however they have an equal amount of importance compared relative to music. Music can be seen as a very carefully planned balance of sound and silence. Composers such as John Cage and Penderecki made sure that it was clear composers and musicians should know these differences. If you are interested in hearing these pieces, check out "4:33" by John Cage and "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" by Penderecki. Both of them are earfuls for two different reasons! Digressing from modern music and back onto my last post, we see that I explained how music is divided counting wise and what the time signature is. Now we need to continue and explain more on these concepts.

Music Terms:

~Dotted Rhythm
~Simple & Compound Meter
~Tuplets (Triplets, Duplet, etc.)

Credit: Music-Mind.com

Music does not only divide two ways, but it is possible to divide it into more divisions. The first way is to use dotted rhythm. Dotted rhythms is when you add a dot after the note. The dot represents adding half of the original value to the note. So if you add a dot to a half note, then you have a half note PLUS another quarter note, making it equal to three quarter notes. Also, adding a dot after a whole note makes it a half note added onto the whole note. If you want to add more dots, then you add half of the last value. So a double dotted half note is one half note, PLUS a quarter note PLUS an eighth note. So you half three and a half quarter notes.

The uses of this makes it possible to have compound meters. The best way to explain compound meter is through actual examples. If we take a look at most music, one can feel music in a two or as in four. This is called simple meter. It is either feeling a beat, or pulse, as "one & two &" or something that can be subdivided into half. All of these include 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, or anything related to them. Compound meter comes into play for meters such as 6/8, or 12/8 where the beat is broken into 3. For a more classical and audible examples of this, listen to Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" compared to his "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" (Click on the names to hear audio). Eine Kleine is in a simple meter because the division of the beat is in two, versus Jesu which is in 12/8 and is subdivided in three.

Credit: Scaletrainer.com

If you do not want to write a piece that is completely one way the entire time, you can use tuplets. Tuplets is the generic term used to define a rhythm in a different rhythmic subdivision. The most common example of these are triplets. Triplets are when you fit three notes in the space of two, such as fitting three quarter notes within a two quarter notes. The reverse is true as well, you can fit 2 notes in the space of 3. Using a duple, you can fit two notes within three. It is even possible to fit more in a space.

Before this drags on much longer, I'm going to wrap up rhythm here. Later on, I'll write a full post on polyrhythms and other cool things one can use rhythm for. For now however, this will be the end of this discussion and I'll start with the next topic of this series. Until then, this is Sulli signing off! 

Music Theory 101 #4: The Basic Skills of Music; Rhythm: Pt. 1

Hello and welcome to the next part of the Music Theory 101 series. In our last post we finished our discussion on the first basic principle of music, pitch. For a complete coverage on that topic then click here for the complete list of posts, but here is the quick summary: Pitch is the first of 6 basic principles of music that helps define music. Pitch is the sound that we hear. Think of it as if it’s the clay for our sculpture because without pitch we would not have music. It is the foundation of sound and the foundation of music. Also as mentioned previously, it is measured in Hertz or waves per second. The more waves that pass by a point per second, the higher the frequency is produced and the higher the pitch is. Lower the number of waves that pass by the same point lowers the frequency and the pitch. Finally, the pitch is notated in music by placing notes on the staff. The two common staffs are treble and bass clefs. Each other indicates their own range of notes, and have their own shapes but remember that there are more than those two. There is one more thing I need to bring up. The thing I have yet to mention yet is key signatures, but I will make sure it has its own episode later on after I cover the basic six parts to music.

Music Terms:
Duration (Length)
Note values (Quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, etc.)
Dotted notes
Time Signature

Moving on from pitch is the next thing on is the length of the pitch, mentioned as duration in the first post. As I mentioned, duration is the length the pitch is produced. So it can be played at a certain rate (say 440 Hertz for example) for as long as you want it to be played. However, in order to keep everyone together, there must be a system to make sure that they are together. This is where beats come in. Beats or pulses help define what we feel drives it along. For example, if you've tapped your toe to a piece of music then you understand the way beats work. However, we need to begin by explaining the math behind beats before we combine everything.

Source: PocketMusician

Notes are broken down into values much like fractions are. The best place to start is the quarter note. The quarter note works like a fraction because you combine them and divide them. A quarter note can be subdivided into two eighth notes, or four sixteenth notes. Something good to know is the more it is subdivided, the more flags it will show. So a sixteenth note has 2 flags then an eighth note, which has one. Reversely, two quarter notes equal a half note and two half notes equal a whole note. Just as the smaller notes gain flags, the patter for these is not quite as obvious. The half note looks like a quarter note without a solid body. The whole note is like the half note but without a stem. These are not the only division however because there are other ways to combine them. The largest note value that is notated, but is not the largest possible is a breve (pronouced Brev) or a double whole note. The smallest most commonly seen is a 64th note, or a 16th note of a 16th note. These extremes are not usually used, but it helps to know they exist.

Another thing to understand is how dotted notes work. Dotted notes work as their value plus the value of half of itself. So if you have a dotted half note, then it is read as a half note plus the value of half of itself or a quarter note. So dotted half notes are worth a half note and a quarter note, or three quarter notes. Same for a dotted eighth note. It is worth an eighth note plus a sixteenth, or half its value. So it is worth 3 sixteenth notes in length.

4 notes per measure
quarter note gets the beat
Source: donrathjr.com

Now that I've explained how beats work, and how to visually see them, time to wrap everything together. The way most composers and musicians group beats into manageable groups is the time signature. The time signature is the fraction like section of the staff that shows us where the beats of the piece are. The time signature also makes it possible to break up music into measures. A measure is a section of the staff that is enclosed by two bars. Each bar contains the right amount of beats to follow the time signature.The trick to the time signature is understanding how it works. Each number represents a type of division of time. The numerator (the number on top) represents how many beats are in a measure. It can be any number you want but commonly things are either in 3, 4 or 6. The denominator (the bottom number) is what value gets the beat. There is a limited number that can be used for the denominator because these are the fractions. So in the example above 4/4 time means 4 notes are in a measure and the quarter note gets the beat.

Next time I will go into more detail about how these work together. Thanks for reading and sorry about the delay of this post!

Poster's Perspective: Music According to Adam Sullivan

Hello everyone and welcome to the conclusion of this week of celebration! Today marks the 2 year anniversary of ASMTB, and for a lot of people that seems like something that doesn't really need to have a week's worth of spam invested into such a small piece of trivia. To me this means a lot in several different ways from statistically, personally and of course musically. So without further ado, let us start looking into my perspectives on music and then wrap this two part post up with why this celebration even happened.

First off, music means a lot to me. As you have seen over the past music has meant various this to others such as Family, Community, Life, Exploration, Expression and Growth among many other things to the five people who graciously wrote for this series (especially Anu whom I literally asked her the day of to write hers for me). These are very bold and very positive things that were written and I'm extremely grateful to y'all  for writing for me (is my "Southerness" showing through yet?). The reason I decided to start this little mini series was not simply because I was wanting others to "cover me" while I acquired this horrendous cold or "cover me" while I wrote 3 papers for school, one being a mock dissertation for my music history class, (all of which have happened this week, and why this was a day late). The true reason behind this series was to show one thing: Defining what music means to us is too bold of a thing to simply describe with a couple of answers. There is no right answer to what it means to us, as long as it means something, and to musicians that really is something.

In order to begin with what it means to me, we should begin with a little bit of my history. I was born into a musical family. I am among the third generation of musicians in my family line on both my mom and dad's family, though we think it may go back farther. Both of my mom's parents were choir singers, my grandfather being a choir director for several churches in my home town for years. My dad's mother was a pianist for many years at a church in her home town before she met my other grandfather (dad's dad). Even after they married and moved to where they would eventually move to and have my dad and his siblings, she continued played piano. These events led to how my parents became musicians. My dad is a guitarist formed from the era of rock n roll, and my mom a classical pianist. They, too, would become "church musicians", playing in churches and smaller venues to never take it as a professional career. My dad would eventually stop playing in order to pursue a career in engineering, though he does play the guitars we have laying around from time to time. Mom would try to become a music major but then not finish the degree (something about understanding Neapolitan chords) and would become an accountant. 

Another little tid bit of information that may be helpful is to know that I wound up spending a lot of time with all 6 of them when I was younger instead of simply with my mom and dad. This would have me set up to have a large dose of music from my family over anything else, though baseball was a close second. Even now, I spend a lot of time with my grandparents that are still with me.

The point I'm getting at with these stories is because mine covers all of the examples from before. More literally, music represents family and community. Music has always been one of the factors that kept my family connected throughout the generations of variety. Music has always been a playground of exploration which I feel like I have played around with a lot, though there is always so much more to do. It means growth because music has always given me a ground that has allowed me to root onto. Music means expression because this was always the first thing I went to to express anger or sadness. Music means community because the site you are reading this on was built from vocalizing my thoughts on music. It also means community because that was where I found my few friends that I have. Finally music means life because I honestly wouldn't have done anything else.

There are, two things that music means most to me but you will need to subscribe in order to find out what they were. I am seriously sorry that this article was extended so far behind, but between some family issues and being completely bed ridden by bronchitis, I simply could not produce a post that was remotely comprehensive.  

Poster's Perspective: Music According to Anu Pattabiraman

Dear Music,

I know I don’t do this enough, so I want to take the time to thank you for all the ways in which you enrich my life. To those who don’t know you as well as I do, you may seem like little more than a cryptic pattern of black lines, circles, and squiggles on a page – but I know you are so much more. Here are some of the gifts you have given me over the years:

Persistence: You seemed so hard to tackle, sometimes, but through all the nights you kept me from mastering you unless I slowed down, picked you apart, and practiced you over and over till I spoke the strokes on your pages, you taught me persistence. Whenever I face a challenge, I know now to slow down, pick apart the pieces, and put them back together, with the faith that what I produce will be more beautiful than the ugly challenge it originally was.

Expression: On all those days I was feeling down, the ones on which I felt elated, and the ones where I was melancholy, nostalgic, or pensive, you provided me with a way to express what I couldn’t find the words to say. Regardless of whether there was someone to speak to, I knew there was someone through which my feelings could speak.

Mentors: I needed people to help me explore your depths and innumerable nuances – people who knew you better than I did. The teachers you provided gave me the courage to challenge myself to understand your intricacies, when I would not have had the bravery, energy, or wherewithal to do so on my own. To this day, they remain my closest advisors, whom I can always reach out to for wisdom, courage, or inspiration.

Friends: My closest friends are ones I’ve made through translating your miniscule black strokes into great symphonies and choruses on grand stages. You showed me the bonds that could be forged between people when they listen and respond to each other, when they emote together, and when they each contribute their own small piece to a masterful work of art.

Contribution: You have enabled me to bring joy to countless lives through communicating your beauty to others: to my family, to the sick, to the elderly, to children, and to any who pause their lives to come to a concert and hear something they have not heard before. The gift you have given me to bring meaning into other people’s lives is the one I most cherish.

Growth: Somehow, you continue to surprise me with the infinite forms you can take. From piano, to cello, to voice; from classical, to jazz, to musicals; from world-renowned stages, to weddings, to coffee shops; from my neighbors’ houses, to the local church, to the streets, there seems to be no end to the places where you pop up, and the places where you take me.

I’ve enjoyed our journey so far, Music; so take my hand, and lead me to wherever you choose to take me next. I will gladly follow.

Yours,

Anu Pattabiraman

Alto and Co-Author, Hit Me With Music

Boston, MA

Poster's Perspective: Music According to Kurt Baer

Kurt Baer

PhD Student

Ethnomusicology 

Indiana University-Bloomington

To be honest, I am not sure how music has changed my life, as I’ve never really been in a situation where I did not have some sort of music that I was interested in. I can not think of a time when music has not been an important part of my life—I listened to contemporary Christian music all of the time as a kid (it’s what we had at the house) and started playing saxophone as soon as I went into middle school, and haven’t stopped playing, listening to, and studying music since.

One thing that I can say that music has done for me is given me a way of opening my mind toward understanding others and accepting difference. While any aspect of culture could well serve the same purpose, music provided me with some of my most memorable experiences in accepting, understanding, and ultimately appreciating cultural difference. Time and time again, new types of music have challenged my preexisting aesthetics and worldviews. From when I just happened to download a Cannonball Adderley track as a middle school student, starting my headfirst dive into jazz all the way to my first exposure to the likes of Philip Glass, Alban Berg, and John Cage.

 As a music student, forcing me to reckon with different aesthetic values and systems to my first forays into “world” music that taught me how unnatural and arbitrary the ideas about music I had been studying in music school actually were. Music has served as a tool for opening my mind and attuning myself toward ways of being other than my own. Each experience of listening to something that sounds ”weird,” upon closer inspection, has provided me a means of glimpsing different modes of understanding and ways of being that are just complex, just as important, and just as arbitrary as my own. Perhaps a bit like taking the red pill and finding out you are in the Matrix, this exercise of learning how to understand different types of music can help up new and different ways of seeing the world. While it is admittedly one way of looking at these issues among many, listening to, playing, and studying music has served me as one of the primary ways that I have been able to investigate my own aesthetic and cultural assumptions and make the move toward at least trying to understand and appreciate things that operate in different systems and under different assumptions.

 Gaining this type of understanding—an ability to appreciate, and perhaps even understand and embrace, other value systems than the ones that we are most comfortable with— is in my opinion, incredibly important. History is filled with instances where cultural difference has been taken for cultural inequality because people are not willing to understand it for what it is and instead judge it based upon the qualities of some other system. Music has provided me a space in which to begin figure these issues out. In learning to understand the aesthetic system behind Balinese gamelan music, aestheticizing silence and appreciating random chance in the music of John Cage, perceiving the nuances of the development in a Beethoven sonata, and appreciating the artistry in Snoop Dogg’s flow, I have better been able to understand the presence of many different cultural and aesthetic systems, which in turn has allowed me to investigate my own personal tastes and cultural assumptions and recognize them as such. This process of understanding —or learning to understand—myself and others has been immensely rewarding to me, opening me up to new experiences and shaping and enriching my life in important ways.

Poster's Perspective: Music According to Jason Nyguyen

Jason R. Nguyen

Dual-PhD Student

Folklore & Ethnomusicology / Communication & Culture

Indiana University-Bloomington

I come from a family that appreciates music and can even be considered musicians (my mom loves to sing and my dad has been known to pluck out a few tunes on the guitar), as long as one doesn't use the highly professionalizing mentality of music practice in the United States. Of course, they generally bought into this latter mentality, because the ability to perform music (especially classical music) in highly skilled ways suggests in our culture that you are intellectual, cultured, and successful. As a Vietnamese immigrant family, these were important qualities that my parents wanted to confer on their children, so my two sisters and I started learning how to play the violin since about kindergarten. I dutifully played violin throughout primary school and into college: first chair at my high school, first chair in the county, second chair when I got to college. So I've had a successful run as a musician.

But by the end of college, violin had become less important to me. It started to have less relevance in my life. Since I didn't plan on going to a music conservatory, violin and classical music had very little relevance to my social life, and I had already proven my prowess well past the point where greater skill could provide further social capital for someone not planning on a career as a professional violinist. So what was the point? Did I just waste all those years of my life?

Of course not. I wouldn't have traded those experiences for anything. But I think we have to think differently about what music is and what it does to truly understand its value and for me to make my case about the importance of music in my life. We have to understand that our society tends to privilege virtuosity and great skill in music as the reasons for doing it, when those values don't really add up to much of anything in terms of social or financial capital unless you're the absolute best of the best. No, playing violin was at its most valuable to me when it was part of a web of social relationships, when I was participating as part of a group of people trying to achieve an end together: perform an opera, learn a hard piece together, enjoy each other's company, have fun, etc.

Tom Turino refers to "participatory music" in Music as Social Life as being "about the opportunity of connecting in special ways with others and experiencing flow" and "not merely the informal sideline to the 'real' event [...] but rather they are at the center of social life" (2008, pg. 35). This approach to music and its possible value goes against the grain of an individualistic and market-oriented society, but I think it is at the center of finding value in music for anybody but the most elite of musicians. Indeed, my outlook on music in general has shifted entirely from that of my parents. Not simply a tool to teach me discipline or a social practice that confers a certain amount of respectability, music needs to matter in the social relations you make. What ties I still have to my days playing the violin are ties to people: friends I made in the orchestra and wonderful, dedicated teachers. Consequently, when and if I have children someday, I will most certainly urge them to play music, but I will point them towards music and dance that they might enjoy outside of such specific contexts. Perhaps they will learn to play the violin as I did, or maybe they would prefer to beatbox and rap. Maybe one will find greater joy and camaraderie in the school band, while another decides to start a punk rock band.

For me, music doesn't so much change a life as interweaves inextricably with it. It is meaningful when one can't imagine anything before or after it. What was my life before music? There wasn't one.

Poster's Perspective: Music According to Elizabeth Davis

Hello. It's an honor and a pleasure to be asked to submit to this special anniversary week at the blog. For those of you who haven't met me yet, I'm Beth, a cellist and composer living in Columbia, MD, playing in a few of the community orchestras between Baltimore and Washington, DC. When Adam asked if I'd like to write an a article on the theme, celebrating the blog's anniversary and sharing my music experiences, I jumped at the chance.

In a word, music to me means collaboration - from joining a community orchestra when moving to a new town to composition projects that literally span the globe. More about that in a minute.

From my earliest school days in the choir to the orchestra concert I played in last weekend, I have always thrilled to be part of a greater whole. Nothing quite compares to slipping into the gestalt of seventy-odd people converging under the maestro's baton into that perfect moment when it all comes together. Whether it's the ethereal shimmering of a solo woodwind whispering above the muted strings or the enthusiastic, almost tribal rhythm pounding out in the low brass and percussion, being up in the middle of it, playing as a part of the whole, is an experience that you just wont get listening from the audience. And it doesn't just happen overnight. Every practice we have adds to the cohesive connectivity and reinforces musical and friendly bonds.

Music is also a way I can plug in to a new community. I've had to move many times following my spouse to new jobs in new states. And every time we resettle, one of the first things I do is find a local group I can join. I've yet to wind up somewhere that DIDN'T have a community orchestra nearby. Joining gives me an instant community of fellows who also love playing and I'll often end up playing in other chamber groups with members as well. My current string quartet for instance includes the orchestra's 2nd chair first violin and the principal violist who also conducts the ballet where I am now principal cellist. I even work as program assistant for a non-profit that will be playing a concert in Alexandria, VA this summer and Argentina next fall.

I'm currently in the middle of a project that has grown into quite a collaborative effort. It first started when I told one of the dancers where I was playing in the pit that I'd write a ballet for him. It has now grown to not only be slated to be performed by that ballet school and orchestra, but also be recorded by a youth orchestra on the other side of the country with a conductor who works predominantly with Czech ensembles (the conductor was a fellow student at college, he put me in touch with the youth orchestra director). My video editor is a high schooler I met through a fan base for The Piano Guys; my text editor is someone I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with when she was a teenager who now teaches creative writing in Michigan and wrote a poem I am currently setting to music for a tenor who works in Munich, Germany. You can find out more about this project HERE (http://kck.st/OuRmsh)

Finally, as Faith noted Sunday, music is family. These days I get to collaborate with music family members I would have never met without having music so much in my life.

Elizabeth Skola Davis

Music Theory 101 #3: The Basic Skills of Music; Pitch Pt. 2

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Music Theory series on here. Before I begin, I would like to say thank you for all the reception and the help that was given towards helping me out with the site! It is not very apparent unless you run a project or a website to realize how much help there is when everyone submits feedback on it. From the bottom of my heart, I sincerely mean thank you. There was some things discussed that will cause a huge shift in this website within the near future, so stay tuned for that!

Key Terms:
Staff
Middle C
Treble Clef (G clef)
Bass Clef (F clef)
Grand Staff

As we were discussing last time, pitch is one of the six basic principles of a language. We have also discussed the basics of pitch as well from it's purpose to how it is heard and even broken it down into the 12 pitches on a keyboard. However, just so we can wrap this discussion up we need to go ahead and head from the basics that every musician knows and talk about the basic skill that every musician should know but do not. This is the staff and reading the clefs.

Blank staff lines from this site

First, we must look at what the staff is. The Music Staff is the space that musicians start when looking at music. It is a set of lines and spaces that musicians use to create notes. There are five (5) lines and four (4) spaces. As you go towards the top of the page, you go higher in pitch or heading towards the bottom of the page the lower you go. The notes themselves vary depending on which clef you are using.

In order to make sure that the following is extremely clear, we must find one point that defines each clef equally. For this, we are going to use "middle C" or the C that is in the middle of the piano. It is usually marked by the logo in the middle of the piano's cover but there are digital keyboards that note where it is. Something else I should bring up now is the statement of octave indicators (or Scientific Pitch Notation). This is how we figure out if a note is higher or lower without saying "this note is higher than" and so on. In the case of the previously stated "Middle C", it is identified as C4. The way I remember that middle C is C4 is thinking "Music starts at C and music is explosive!" (corny, but it works if you need something to use to learn). The way the indicators are meant to work as from C to B. So for example B3 is the B below middle C. For another example, let us look at D5. It is the D an octave above middle C. So instead of being the D directly above middle C, it is a note and an octave up.

This is a treble clef on a staff
Source: It's A Visual Medium

The clef is the first symbol on the staff. It defines where what note is on a staff, much like a a musical GPS coordinator. There are several dozen standardized clefs that are out there, and hundreds of non-standardized but  for this article, we will will talk about two specifically. The first clef we will look at is the Treble Clef, also known as the G clef. The reason for the name is the part that curls around the second to bottom line is noted as G. The space below that is an F, the line below that is E and so on. The space below the G is A, the line above that is B and so on. This G is known as G4 which means it is the G above middle C.

This is a bass clef on a staff
Source: Mr. Scheiber's Music Room

The other clef is the Bass Clef also known as the F clef. As with the previous, the reason for the second name is because the dots are placed around the note F. Also as before if you go down, you have E and D or up leads to G and A. Now, the thing to realize is this F is an F3, or the F below middle C.

This is a grand staff and note equivalents
Source: Click here

The final portion of this post will be about the grand staff and it's uses. The Grand Staff is the combination of the bass and treble clefs. It is used for piano, piano styled instruments and harp reading primarily but is used to condense scores down into an easier to read format. The reasoning is to create a larger range of pitches than any one can accomplish by themselves. It reads as if one large staff. The meet in the middle at middle C. Along with the additional space, there is an additional an bracket at the beginning to link them together. In the case of organ music, there would be three or possibly four staves but as I stated before this is primarily two. Next time we will start heading onto the next topic of discussion!

The Many Uses of Troping

Last we left them, the monks were ready to try something new. Very short texts set to very long chants were rather difficult to memorize. One fellow in particular, a monk named Notker the Stammerer who lived in the Abby of St. Gall around 800 A.D, just couldn't manage to remember the Alleluias. So, in order to help him remember the long melodic passages, he wrote a poem to match the melody. If every note had its own syllable, it was much easier to memorize. Then, when it was time to sing the liturgy, all he had to do was drop the words and replace them with "Al-le-lu-ia-----------"

Funny enough, other people liked the idea. They didn't just use his poems for practice and memory work. They started singing them along as part of the service. And so troping was born. This practice--adding to or expanding an existing chant--became extremely popular and saw many variations over the next 400 or so years.

See, in the church music scene in the early years, the original liturgical text was sacred. Paramount, untouchable, sacred. You couldn't get rid of it. You couldn't change it. But there was a catch--you could expand it, add stuff around or on top it, and pretty much do whatever you wanted, as long as the original text could still be found in there somewhere. So troping was the perfect technique as musicians began to expand their horizons.

It was also around this time that musical theatre was born. Liturgical dramas were staged for special days, such as Christmas or Easter. Most of the text was straight from Biblical accounts, but there were elaborate stage directions included in the manuscripts. This art form slowly evolved away from the liturgy and the church, and moved to the towns and villages. As did music.

By the time the new millennium had rung itself in, a group of monk school dropouts had formed and called themselves the Goliards.  They traveled around doing what most college students do--drinking, partying, and finding girls to join them. And because they were at least partially educated in the monasteries, they could write and they could sing. By the 1200s, there was at least one manuscript of secular Latin songs. Some were course, some were poetic, and some tried to be at least a little bit moral.

Of course the trend spread, giving rise to the troubadours of southern France, the trouveres of northern France, the minstrals of England and the minnesingers of Germany. They all wrote and sang about pretty much the same things: wine, women, and war. Like as not, they accompanied themselves on instruments such as early forms of the violin, the recorder and of course percussion.

The church still did its best to keep instruments out of the services. This didn't stop them from experimenting with new ways to expand their music without losing the foundation of the chant. About the same time secular music was on its rise, somebody came up with the novel idea of two groups singing at the same time, called organum. It started out very simple--two voices singing the same old chant, but one moving completely parallel to the first at a fourth or fifth below. Then they learned how to move in contrary motion but avoid any nasty intervals. Mostly consonances were used--unison, octave, fifth and fourth, with a couple sixths or thirds thrown in at the cadences.

Slowly but surely, the musicians became comfortable singing different rhythms simultaeously. The choir would sing the original chant with its original melody, while the soloist improvised the organum voice with a separate rhythm on top of the cantus firmus (fixed song). The next obvious step was adding more voices. Some chants had up to four. These upper parts were rarely written out. Instead, they were improvised following a very specific set of rules laid out in a grand treatise written around 1100 A.D.--"Ad Organum Faciendum" Or, On Making Organum.

There were two specific types of organum, and each was paired to a specific type of chant. Each note of the very long, melismatic passages in the original chant corrosponded to maybe two or three notes of organum. This was called discant organum. The simpler, long tones of a chant would be set to more melismatic organum parts, called florid organum. Leonin, who worked at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, collected a book of transcribed organum parts, and aptly titled it "The Big Book of Organum." This particular chant comes from Leonin's anthology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bganS0KBsEY


So it happened, that without even realizing it, polyphony--music with more than one voice--was born, evolved and gradually became the accepted method of composition. There was one more development to the chant, one more application of troping, that we will discuss next time. So make sure to come back in a couple weeks and check it out!

On a completely separate note, if you live anywhere near the UNC Charlotte campus, and have nothing to do on Thursday, February 13th, you might consider coming to hear me play in the UNCC Chamber Orchestra concert at 7:30 in Rowe Recital Hall. Admission is free, and it will be a pretty awesome program--Beethoven, Lully and Finzi (with an amazing tenor solo by the esteemed Dr. Brian Areola). Need details? Just ask!

Music Theory 101 #2: The Basic Skills of Music; Pitch Pt. 1

Hello and welcome back everyone! In the previous post from this series, I explained the basic principles of sound and how they transfer to music. I talked about the difference between Frequency, Amplitude, Duration and Timbre and how they affected the sound wave. This now leads me towards our next discussion and the one that will fuel the first part of this series: Why does all the science "mumbo jumbo" matters in a lesson series on music? I will begin to go into depth on each of the topics from an introduction to music sort of manner.

Just as a heads, this will probably take a few posts because I am putting a lot of detail in explaining everything. Just be aware that it appears dense but in actuality, it is just detail. I'm going to test out this system of highlighting key terms and listing them at the beginning of the post and see how they go. Let me know what you think of this method because I may keep using it for a while. Also, don't forget to subscribe! We love everyone who reads our posts but we need people to subscribe to our posts! All you have to do is submit your email in the box to the right and check confirm from a confirmation email. You will get emails of when we post an article and it helps us keep track of who all is reading our work regularly. Also, in the near future there will be a bio page and a link to creating a master list of our posts for your convenience. So without further ado, let's head on over to start explaining pitch!

Key terms:
-Pitch (Frequency)
-Musical Alphabet
-Octave
-Accidentals
-Sharp
-Flat
-Enharmonic

If you are going to learn to read, play or write music, you need to understand the six basic principles of every language: Pitch, Timbre, Articulations, Dynamics, Rhythm and Form (though not in this order). Now, this goes with saying that there are many different opinions and many different interpretation of how to classify basic musical concepts. Books will take several different approaches towards explaining this information. Consider this my way of saying if someone tells you something different or they teach it to you in a different way then that is ok. As long as you understand the general idea then they are allowed to do that. So then, let us head on and take a look at half of these and apply them to music!

Let us start with Pitch, or as it was called in the last episode, frequency. This is the most commonly seen parts of music even if people do not realize it. As we discussed previously, frequency was defined as the amount of waves that travel over a point during a certain time. This is read in Hertz or waves per second. Using that same 440 example as in the last post, there are four hundred and forty sound waves that go to our ear drums per second. Same for any other example you can think of from 1 to infinity. The average person can hear from 20 to 20k (20,000) hertz. As far of a spectrum as this is, music is not a random assortment of pitches. In fact, it follows a pattern of twelve (12) notes in a specific order starting with the musical alphabet.

The musical alphabet is generally defined as the first seven (7) letters of the English alphabet; A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The placement of these notes all vary in different ways depending on the clef and the location on the staff in general and changes, but let us keep it simple, seeing there is a lot of information for one page.

Picture from NetPlaces.com post on The Language of Music

Traditionally, the pitches will fall under the same way a piano is laid out, such as the picture to the left. It is traditionally seen starting on C, however we will use the example in the picture. The bracket starts on A and by going up or down, depending on how the music is written, but you wind back up on A. The genius behind the system is the notes are not the same pitch, but sound higher or lower. The far left C is higher than the C on the far right. The range of eight notes in a row is called an octave. So from the A on the left to the middle A, you have traveled an octave. Same for going from this middle A to the right most A, or any range of notes, as long as they travel to the same letter.

Picture from Penn State's Virtual Piano
Click to expand 

You may be wondering "If he said there was 12 notes, why has he only listed 7"? There is a simple answer to this question: Accidentals, or in the case of the piano all of the black keys between the white keys. They make up accidentals, or pitches that are not within a given key signature. Before we go completely off tangent, I will explain key signatures later but accidentals are important to understand now. Accidentals show to the person reading the music if you should make the original note sharp (#; raise the note up a step) or make the note flat (b; lower the note a step). So for example, we see an F on the keyboard and to the right of it is a black key. If you went up to the black key from F, you went from F up to F sharp (F#). However, looking at the G, there are black keys on both sides of it. You can go from G up to G sharp (G#) or from G down to G flat (Gb). An important concept to understand would be enharmonic spelling, or notes that are the same pitch, but spelled differently. So, as stated before, F# and Gb are the same pitch but they are spelled differently. This will be an important concept soon, however we need to move on from here.

Before I drag this post on for too long, I feel I should split it up into two posts. As always, if you like the post then subscribe and let us know! We love feedback as much as we love subscriptions! Also, for those whom have visited the page have noticed, I have a donation button up. I have a couple of projects I am trying to start up (one being a full video series for these articles and the other being donating custom rosin to the group of students I volunteer/intern with) but I need everyone's help! The more money we can raise, the better we can fund things like this to help benefit arts programs and arts education. I am considering a kick starter but I haven't completely decided on if I'm going to go about it that way. We will have to wait and see.