Middle School Music: Listening, Reading & Making Music

In the summer of 1977, at Wessex Sound Studios in London, the four members of the rock band Queen sat on a wooden drum platform and made the same three sounds again and again: stomp, stomp, clap. Their road crew joined in. So did an assistant engineer called Andy Turner, and Betty, who made the tea at the studio.

There were no drums on the track and no bass guitar. Brian May, the guitarist who wrote the song, and the co-producer Mike Stone layered the takes on top of each other and gave each one a slightly different echo. A dozen people ended up sounding like a crowd of hundreds. The song is We Will Rock You. It came out in October 1977, opening the album News of the World, and it lasts about two minutes.

May later explained where the idea came from. He had been asking himself what a packed concert audience can actually do. They cannot move much. They can stamp their feet, clap their hands and sing. So he wrote a song out of exactly those three things.

A note before you press play. If you listen on headphones or earbuds, keep the volume at or below about 60 percent of your device's maximum, which is the World Health Organization's advice, and rest your ears now and then. Ringing in your ears that will not go away is one of the warning signs of hearing damage.

The puzzle: a stadium with no conductor

The song has since become a chant at sports stadiums around the world. Picture what happens there. Tens of thousands of people who have never met and never rehearsed start stomping and clapping, and within a few seconds they are together. Nobody stands at the front waving a stick. How does a crowd that size stay in step?

One guess is that everybody listens for the stomp and then copies it. That cannot be right. If you waited to hear each stomp before you made yours, you would always be a little late. A stadium full of late people would smear into noise.

Scientists have tested this. When people tap along with a ticking metronome, their taps land within a few hundredths of a second of the ticks, even if they have never had a music lesson. In one experiment, monkeys needed more than a year of training to tap along at all, and their taps still came a few tenths of a second after each click. Humans do not wait for the beat. They predict it.

Key idea: A crowd stays together because every person is predicting when the next beat will come, not reacting to the one they just heard.

The pulse: the beat you can predict

The thing everyone is predicting has a name. Musicians call it the pulse, or the beat. It is a steady series of moments, evenly spaced in time, that you can tap your foot to. Researchers who study music around the world report that every human culture has some music with a beat. People use it to guide dancers and to keep players together.

Here is the strange part: the pulse does not have to be heard. In We Will Rock You there is a gap after every clap, a moment where nobody makes a sound. Your body still knows exactly when the next stomp is due. The pulse is something you feel and carry inside you. The sounds remind you where it is. They are not the pulse itself.

Try it now, before you read on. Play the official video of the song; the link is in the Sources and in the activity. Pat one knee on the first stomp and again on the clap, so you make two even pats for each stomp, stomp, clap. Keep patting when the voice comes in. If your pats stay evenly spaced, you have found the pulse.

Pulse and rhythm are not the same thing

The stomps and claps themselves make a rhythm: a pattern of sounds and silences, some close together and some further apart, laid over the pulse. The pulse is the steady grid. The rhythm is what happens on it.

You can see the difference if you split time into small, equal slots and count them out loud: one, and, two, and, three, and, four, and. Each number is a pulse. Each "and" falls exactly halfway between two pulses.

Read the table from left to right. The first stomp lands on a pulse. The second stomp sneaks in halfway to the next one. The clap lands on a pulse, and the silence fills the other half. The pattern repeats every two pulses, while the pulse itself just keeps ticking.

Notice where the claps fall: on 2 and on 4. In most rock and pop songs a drummer hits the snare drum, the sharp, cracking drum, in exactly those places. An accent on beats 2 and 4 is called the backbeat. Queen built a whole rock beat without a drum kit: the feet play the part of the low bass drum and the hands play the snare.

Worth holding on to: The pulse is the steady grid. The rhythm is the pattern of sounds on that grid, and some of its sounds land between the beats.

Tempo: how fast the pulse goes

Tempo is the speed of the pulse. Musicians measure it in beats per minute, written BPM. A clock's second hand ticks at 60 BPM: one beat every second. At 120 BPM the beats come twice as fast, two every second.

A machine that ticks out a tempo is called a metronome. A Dutch inventor, Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel, built a pendulum timekeeper in Amsterdam in 1814. Johann Maelzel added a numbered scale, patented the design in England in 1815 and sold it under his own name from 1816. That is why old scores mark tempo with the letters M.M., for Maelzel's Metronome. Ludwig van Beethoven knew Maelzel, and in December 1815 he became the first well-known composer to write metronome numbers into his music. Today a free phone app does the same job.

You do not need any machine to measure a tempo. You need a clock and some counting:

1. Start a stopwatch, or watch the seconds on a clock.
2. Pat the pulse and count your pats for exactly 15 seconds.
3. Multiply your count by 4, because a minute is four lots of 15 seconds.

A worked example: you count 25 pats in 15 seconds. 25 times 4 is 100, so the tempo is 100 BPM. If you had counted 30, the tempo would be 120 BPM. Counting for a full 30 seconds and multiplying by 2 is more accurate. One missed pat then costs you only 2 BPM instead of 4.

The tempos your body likes

People can feel a beat over a wide range of speeds, but not an endless one. The psychologists Aniruddh Patel and John Iversen pulled together the research on this in 2014. Here is what it shows, with the time between beats worked out for you:

This explains a trap you will meet in the activity. When beats come very fast, listeners tend to lock onto every other one, so they count half the speed. When beats come very slowly, they may feel extra beats in between and count double. Open Music Theory, a free university textbook, calls these a half-time and a double-time feel. Both counts are honest measurements of different layers of the same music. The layer most people would tap their foot to is the one musicians call the beat.

In short: Tempo is the speed of the pulse in beats per minute. Count for 15 seconds and multiply by 4, and check whether you are counting every beat or every other one.

Your body as a drum kit

Body percussion means making rhythm with your own body instead of an instrument. Queen used two sounds. You have at least four, and they run from low to high just like the drums in a kit:

Two habits matter more than any fancy pattern. First, keep the pulse somewhere in your body at all times, even if it is only a small nod of the head. Second, make the silences exact. In We Will Rock You the silence after each clap lasts exactly as long as the gap between the two stomps. Cut it short and you will speed up. Let it stretch and you will slow down.

Speeding up without meaning to is called rushing, and slowing down without meaning to is called dragging. Excitement makes most people rush. The cure is to listen outward while you play: to the recording, to a metronome or to a friend tapping the pulse.

Listening guide: We Will Rock You

• Where to find it: the official video on Queen's own YouTube channel, filmed in the snow-covered garden of the drummer Roger Taylor's house in Surrey, England. It runs about two minutes.
• From the very first second: stomp, stomp, clap, silence. Find the pulse on the first stomp and on the clap before the voice arrives.
• When the singing starts: Freddie Mercury's voice rides on top of the same pattern. The three verses follow one person through a whole life: a hopeful child, a man in his prime and an old man. Notice how many words he fits between two claps, then notice that the claps themselves have not sped up at all. A busy voice does not mean a fast tempo.
• The chorus: the part built for a whole crowd to sing, over the same unchanging stomp and clap.
• The ending: Brian May's electric guitar finally arrives for a solo. It is the first instrument you hear in the whole song.

Common misconceptions

• "The beat is the drum." Drums often play the beat, but the beat is a feeling of evenly spaced time that you keep inside you. We Will Rock You has no drums at all, and the beat carries on through every silence.
• "Fast music is music with lots of notes." Tempo is the speed of the pulse, not the number of sounds. A singer can pour out words over a slow, steady stomp, and a fast song can hold one long note across several beats.
• "Some people just have no rhythm." Tapping along with a metronome is easy for almost everyone, with or without training: in experiments, ordinary volunteers land within a few hundredths of a second of the clicks. What takes practice is keeping the pulse steady while you do something complicated on top of it.
• "Louder means faster." Volume and speed are separate controls. You can stomp and clap very quietly at exactly the same tempo as you do loudly, and you will try that in the activity.

What to carry forward

The pulse is a steady, predictable series of beats that you feel even when nothing sounds, and a crowd stays together because everyone predicts it. Rhythm is the pattern of sounds and silences laid on top of the pulse, and some of those sounds fall between the beats, like the second stomp in We Will Rock You. The claps on 2 and 4 are a backbeat. Tempo is the speed of the pulse in beats per minute: count for 15 seconds and multiply by 4. People feel a beat most strongly between about 50 and 150 BPM, and outside that range they tend to halve or double what they count. Your body gives you a drum kit of four sounds, from stomp up to snap, and Brian May built a world-famous rock beat from just two of them. Next you will learn to write patterns like his down on paper.

Sources

1. Draper, J. (2026, July 19). 'We Will Rock You': The story behind Queen's unbeatable anthem. brianmay.com. brianmay.com
2. Queen. (1977). We Will Rock You [Official video]. Queen Official, YouTube. youtube.com
3. Patel, A. D., and Iversen, J. R. (2014). The evolutionary neuroscience of musical beat perception: The Action Simulation for Auditory Prediction (ASAP) hypothesis. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 8, 57. frontiersin.org
4. Hanenberg, S. (n.d.). Drumbeats. In M. Gotham, K. Gullings, C. Hamm, B. Hughes, B. Jarvis, M. Lavengood and J. Peterson, Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
5. World Health Organization. (n.d.). Deafness and hearing loss: Safe listening. who.int
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Metronome. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On 8 December 1813, in the great hall of the University of Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven conducted the first performance of his Seventh Symphony. The concert raised money for soldiers wounded at the Battle of Hanau. When the second movement, the Allegretto, finished, the audience would not let the concert go on. They demanded to hear the movement again, there and then, and the orchestra played it a second time.

What they wanted to hear twice is built almost entirely on one short rhythm. You can say it right now: long, short-short, long, long. It starts quietly in the low strings and hardly stops for the next eight or so minutes. By the end of this lesson you will be able to write that rhythm down, clap it from the page, and see why moving its pieces around turns it into the stomp, stomp, clap you met in the last lesson.

From long and short to note values

In the last lesson you found the pulse, the steady beat underneath the music. Rhythm is made of sounds that last for different amounts of that pulse. Music notation does not write "long" and "short". It writes exact lengths, called note values, and every one of them is measured against the beat.

Open Music Theory, a free university textbook, compares note values to cutting a pizza. A whole note splits into two halves, four quarters, eight eighths and sixteen sixteenths, just as a whole pizza does. Each value is exactly half the one before it.

In most of the music you will meet, the quarter note gets one beat. Here is the whole family on that basis, with what each one looks like described in words, and the rhythm syllables many music teachers use to say them out loud. These syllables come from the method of the Hungarian composer and teacher Zoltán Kodály.

Look at how each shape gets shorter: add a stem and a whole note becomes a half note; fill in the oval and it becomes a quarter note; add a flag and it becomes an eighth note; add a second flag and it becomes a sixteenth. A beam is just a flag stretched sideways to join notes that belong to the same beat, so a pair of eighth notes is easier to read at a glance.

The point: A note value is not a length in seconds. It is a length in beats, and each value is half the one above it.

Rests: the silences have lengths too

A rest is a written silence. Every note value has a matching rest that lasts exactly as long. The whole rest is a small block hanging down from a line of the staff; the half rest is the same block sitting on top of a line, like a hat. A quarter rest is a squiggle, and eighth and sixteenth rests look like a small 7 with one or two flags.

The most important thing about a rest is that the pulse does not stop during it. You felt that in We Will Rock You: the silence after each clap is counted, not skipped. When you say rhythm syllables, say nothing for a rest, but keep your foot tapping and turn your hands palm-up so you can feel the silence go by.

Worked example 1: Beethoven's rhythm, step by step

Here is the procedure for turning a rhythm you hear into one you can read and write. Follow it with the Allegretto playing; the link is in the Sources and the activity.

1. Find the pulse. Tap your foot to the steady beat under the low strings. The music moves at a calm walking pace.
2. Mark which sounds start on a beat. The first long note starts on a beat. So do the last two longs.
3. Measure each sound in beats. Each "long" lasts one whole beat. The two "shorts" share a single beat between them, so each is half a beat.
4. Turn the lengths into note values. One beat is a quarter note. Half a beat is an eighth note.
5. Say it, then clap it. Quarter, two eighths, quarter, quarter becomes ta, ti-ti, ta, ta.

Lay it out on a grid where every box is half a beat and you can see the whole pattern at once:

Add up the beats to check your work: 1 plus a half plus a half plus 1 plus 1 makes 4 beats. Beethoven's score groups them as two bars of two beats each, written 2/4, which the next lesson explains. Wikipedia's article on the symphony describes the same pattern: a quarter note, two eighth notes and two quarter notes. A rhythm that repeats like this, over and over, is called an ostinato, from the Italian for "stubborn".

Worked example 2: the same pieces in a different order

Now change one thing. Keep the same ingredients, a pair of eighth notes and a quarter note, but put the short notes first.

Clap them one after the other. Same note values, same total length, a completely different feel. In ti-ti, ta, the two quick notes seem to run up to the long one. In ta, ti-ti, the long note comes first and the quick notes trail after it.

There is one more detail worth noticing. A clap cannot really last a whole beat; it stops at once. So a careful musician writing down We Will Rock You would put an eighth note for the clap and an eighth rest after it: ti, ti, ti, rest. It sounds the same as ti-ti, ta, because a clap has no length to hold. With a voice or a violin, which can hold a note, the two versions would sound different. Choosing between a longer note and a shorter note plus a rest is how a composer tells players exactly when to stop.

Worth holding on to: Rhythm is not just which lengths you use. It is the order you put them in and where the silences go.

Dots and ties: lengths in between

What if you need a sound that lasts three beats, or one and a half? Two marks handle it.

• A dot after a note adds half of that note's value again. A dotted half note lasts 2 plus 1, so 3 beats. A dotted quarter note lasts 1 plus a half, so one and a half beats. A dotted quarter followed by an eighth fills two beats, and Kodály teachers say it as tum-ti.
• A tie is a curved line joining two notes of the same pitch. You play the first one and simply hold it through the second. A half note tied to a quarter note lasts 3 beats, the same as a dotted half.

You will meet dotted rhythms again in the next lesson, because they are the building blocks of music that swings along in threes.

Listening guide: Beethoven, Symphony No. 7, second movement (Allegretto)

• The recording: the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam conducted by Iván Fischer, posted on the orchestra's own YouTube channel in its Symphonic Gems series. It lasts about nine and a half minutes.
• The opening: one held chord from the wind instruments, and then silence. Get your foot ready.
• The rhythm begins: the violas and cellos, the low strings, start ta, ti-ti, ta, ta, very quietly. Clap along softly.
• The pile-up: each time the tune comes round, a higher group takes it over. First the second violins play it while the violas and cellos add a new, flowing melody against it. Then the first violins take it, and finally the wind instruments join with the whole orchestra, much louder. The rhythm never changes; only the number of players does.
• The change of mood: the music turns from minor to major, which sounds brighter, and clarinets and bassoons sing a smooth, broad melody. Listen underneath them: a long, short-short piece of the rhythm keeps walking along.
• The return and the ending: the original rhythm comes back, and the movement ends the way it began, with a chord from the wind instruments. Did your foot keep the pulse all the way through?

Common misconceptions

• "A quarter note lasts one second." A quarter note lasts one beat, and how long a beat lasts depends on the tempo. At 60 BPM it is one second; at 120 BPM it is half a second.
• "A rest means the music has stopped." A rest is part of the rhythm. The pulse carries on through it, and coming back in at exactly the right moment is the whole skill.
• "Eighth notes make the music go faster." Eighth notes split the beat into two; they do not speed up the beat. The tempo of the Allegretto stays the same while its eighth notes go by.
• "Longer notes are louder." Length and loudness are separate. A whole note can be whispered, and a sixteenth can be very loud.

The short version

Note values measure sound in beats. With the quarter note as one beat, the whole note lasts 4, the half note 2, the eighth note a half and the sixteenth a quarter, and each value is half the one above it. Every note value has a rest of the same length, and the pulse keeps going through rests. Kodály rhythm syllables let you say rhythms out loud: ta for a quarter, ti-ti for two eighths, too for a half. A dot adds half a note's value again and a tie joins two notes into one longer sound. To write down a rhythm you hear, find the pulse, mark which sounds begin on a beat, measure each sound in beats and turn the lengths into note values. Beethoven's Allegretto is ta, ti-ti, ta, ta repeated as an ostinato; put the same pieces in the order ti-ti, ta and you have Queen's stomp, stomp, clap.

Sources

1. Gotham, M., Hamm, C., and Hughes, B. (n.d.). Notating rhythm. In M. Gotham, K. Gullings, C. Hamm, B. Hughes, B. Jarvis, M. Lavengood and J. Peterson, Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Sharkey, L. C. (2025). 2.7: Counting methods. In Equipping the Musical Ear. Sierra College, LibreTexts. human.libretexts.org
3. Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Fischer, I. (n.d.). Symphonic Gems: Beethoven, Symphony No. 7, II. Allegretto [Video]. Concertgebouworkest, YouTube. youtube.com
4. Chan-Hartley, H. (n.d.). Program notes: Beethoven Symphony No. 7. National Arts Centre Orchestra. nac-cna.ca
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Symphony No. 7 (Beethoven). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On 15 June 1889, on the grounds of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., a huge crowd gathered for a newspaper's prize-giving. The Washington Post had run an essay contest for schoolchildren, and its new owners had asked John Philip Sousa, the leader of the United States Marine Band, to write a march for the ceremony. President Benjamin Harrison was in the audience. The march was called The Washington Post.

Within a few years people on both sides of the Atlantic were dancing a new dance to it, the two-step, and a British journalist had nicknamed Sousa "The March King". Part of the reason is the way the march groups its beats. It moves in twos, left and right like walking feet, but every beat is split into three. That combination has a name, and by the end of this lesson you will be able to hear it, count it and write it.

Beats come in groups

In Lesson 1 you found the pulse. Listen to almost any music for a while and you will notice that the beats are not all equal. Some feel heavier than others, and the heavy ones come back in a regular pattern. That repeating pattern of strong and weak beats is called meter.

Each complete group of beats is a bar, which American musicians also call a measure. In written music, vertical lines called bar lines separate the bars. The first beat of every bar is the strongest. It is called the downbeat, because a conductor's hand comes down on it.

Try three quick experiments, each for about 20 seconds. Count 1, 2, 1, 2 and pat your knees on every 1. Then count 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 and pat only on 1. Then 1, 2, 3, 4. Same pulse each time, but each one makes your body sway in a different shape.

Reading a time signature

At the start of a piece, right after the clef, you will find two numbers stacked on top of each other. This is the time signature. It is not a fraction, even though it looks like one. In the most common meters it says two things:

• The top number tells you how many beats are in each bar.
• The bottom number tells you which note value gets one beat: 4 means the quarter note, 2 means the half note and 8 means the eighth note.

So 3/4 means three beats in a bar, with a quarter note for each beat. 4/4 means four quarter-note beats, and it is so common that it is sometimes written as a large letter C, for "common time". 2/4 means two quarter-note beats: the Allegretto from the last lesson is written in 2/4.

Meters like these, where each beat splits into two halves, are called simple meters. In a compound meter each beat splits into three instead. The most common one is 6/8. Here the numbers work differently: six eighth notes fill the bar, but they are grouped as two beats of three. Each beat is a dotted quarter note, which, as you learned, lasts as long as three eighth notes. Open Music Theory counts a bar of 6/8 like this: 1 la li, 2 la li. The numbers are the beats and "la li" are the two extra parts of each beat.

Remember: In simple meters the top number counts beats. In 6/8 it counts eighth notes, and the beats come in groups of three of them.

Five meters side by side

Here are the five meters you will use most, with a body percussion pattern for each. Capital letters show the strongest beat in the bar.

Reading the table: three things it shows

First, 2 and 4 are close relatives. A bar of 4/4 can be heard as two groups of two, with beat 3 a little stronger than beats 2 and 4. Open Music Theory points out that by ear alone it is not always obvious whether a piece is in 2/4 or 4/4. That is also why a rock backbeat on 2 and 4 sounds so punchy: the drummer puts the loud snare on exactly the beats the meter calls weak.

Second, 3/4 and 6/8 hold the same six eighth notes but group them differently. This is the most useful comparison in the whole table. Lay six boxes out and mark where the beats fall:

Say both rows out loud. The 3/4 row comes out as ONE and TWO and THREE and. The 6/8 row comes out as ONE la li TWO la li. The first sways; the second rocks back and forth, like the two-step Sousa's audience danced.

Third, five is not a mistake. Five beats cannot split into two equal groups, so musicians group them unevenly, either 3 + 2 or 2 + 3. Open Music Theory calls such meters asymmetrical: the bar is divided into unequal groups, which gives an uneven, limping pulse. Once you feel the groups, five becomes as easy to count as any other number.

Drawing the meter in the air

Conductors show the meter with their hands, and you can too. Open Music Theory gives the three basic patterns. Use your right hand, and let each beat be one clear movement that stops for an instant before the next:

Notice that beat 1 is always down, which is where the word downbeat comes from, and the last beat is always up, so your hand is ready to fall on the next downbeat. The last beat is called the upbeat. Compound meters use the same shapes: 6/8 is conducted as a duple pattern, down and up, one movement per dotted-quarter beat.

Listening guide: one waltz, one march and five beats

• Johann Strauss II, The Blue Danube (1866), played by the United States Marine Band in an arrangement for wind instruments. The waltz was first sung by the Vienna Men's Choral Association on 15 February 1867, and Strauss made the orchestral version famous at the Paris World's Fair that same year. After a quiet introduction, the first waltz tune climbs gently up the notes of a chord. Underneath it, listen for the low "oom" on beat 1 and the two lighter "pah" chords on beats 2 and 3. The piece is a chain of several waltzes, each with its own tune, and the three-beat pattern never changes. Conduct it: down, out, up.
• John Philip Sousa, The Washington Post (1889), played by the United States Marine Band, the band Sousa once led, on its 2017 recording of his complete marches, conducted by Jason K. Fettig. It lasts about two and a half minutes. March in place on the two big beats, left and right, and count 1 la li, 2 la li. Every big beat has three quick parts inside it.
• Paul Desmond, Take Five, played by the Dave Brubeck Quartet live in Belgium in 1964, on Dave Brubeck's official YouTube channel. The quartet is Brubeck on piano, Desmond on alto saxophone, Eugene Wright on bass and Joe Morello on drums. They first recorded it in 1959 for the album Time Out, after Morello challenged Desmond to write a piece in 5/4. It went on to become one of the best-selling jazz singles ever made. The piano repeats a two-chord pattern: one chord for three beats, the other for two. Count ONE two three FOUR five, and stamp on 1 and 4.

Common misconceptions

• "4/4 means four notes in every bar." It means four beats' worth of time in every bar. A bar of 4/4 could hold one whole note, or sixteen sixteenth notes, or a mix of notes and rests.
• "6/8 is just 3/4 written with smaller notes." Both bars hold six eighth notes, but 3/4 groups them in three pairs and 6/8 in two threes. They feel different, and a dancer can tell at once.
• "The time signature tells you how fast to go." It tells you how the beats are grouped. The tempo is a separate instruction, given by a metronome number or a tempo word. A waltz can be slow or fast and still be in 3/4.
• "Odd meters are only for experts." Take Five sits in 5/4 the whole way through, and millions of people who have never counted to five in music have tapped along to it.

Putting it together

Meter is the repeating pattern of strong and weak beats, and each group of beats is a bar, marked off by bar lines, with the strongest beat, the downbeat, first. A time signature at the start of the music tells you the meter: in simple meters the top number counts the beats in a bar and the bottom number names the note that gets one beat. In simple meters each beat splits into two; in compound meters such as 6/8 each beat splits into three, so a bar of 6/8 is two beats counted 1 la li, 2 la li. 3/4 and 6/8 hold the same six eighth notes grouped two different ways. Five-beat meters group their beats unevenly, as in the 3 + 2 of Take Five. Conducting patterns draw the meter in the air: down-up for two, down-out-up for three, down-in-out-up for four. Strauss's waltz, Sousa's march and Desmond's tune each make a different meter something you can dance to.

Sources

1. Gotham, M., Hamm, C., and Shaffer, K. (n.d.). Simple meter and time signatures. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Gotham, M., and Hamm, C. (n.d.). Compound meter and time signatures. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
3. Brady, S., and Hamm, C. (n.d.). Twentieth-century rhythmic techniques. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
4. United States Marine Band. (n.d.). An der schönen, blauen Donau (The Blue Danube), Op. 314, arranged for wind ensemble [Audio recording, public domain]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
5. United States Marine Band and Fettig, J. K. (2017). The Washington Post, from The Complete Marches of John Philip Sousa, Vol. 3 [Audio recording, public domain]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
6. The Dave Brubeck Quartet. (1964). Take Five, live in Belgium [Video]. Dave Brubeck, YouTube. youtube.com
7. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Take Five; The Washington Post (march); The Blue Danube. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On 10 August 1899, in Sedalia, Missouri, a Black pianist and composer named Scott Joplin signed a contract with a local music publisher, John Stark. Stark would print and sell a piano piece of Joplin's called the Maple Leaf Rag. Joplin would receive one cent for every copy sold, and each copy would cost at least 25 cents.

Joplin was about thirty. His father, Giles Joplin, had been born into slavery in North Carolina; his mother, Florence Givens, was a free-born African American woman from Kentucky. Scott grew up in Texarkana, Texas, took lessons from a German-born music teacher named Julius Weiss, and spent years travelling the South as a working musician before settling in Sedalia in 1894. There he played at dances and in the town's Black clubs. One of them was called the Maple Leaf Club, which may be where the rag got its name, though nobody has found proof.

Before the piece was even printed, Joplin told his young friend Arthur Marshall that the Maple Leaf would make him "the king of ragtime composers". He was right. But to see why the rag was such a jolt, you need one idea that this lesson is about: putting the accent in the wrong place, on purpose.

What ragtime was

Ragtime is a style of music that grew up in African American communities in the late nineteenth century and was hugely popular from the 1890s to the 1910s. It was mostly written for piano. Musicians think its name comes from its "ragged" rhythm: a tune that keeps tripping over the beat while the accompaniment marches straight ahead.

That accompaniment came from the march, the music of bands like Sousa's that you met in the last lesson. A ragtime pianist's left hand jumps back and forth between a low bass note and a chord: bass, chord, bass, chord. The bass notes land on the strong beats and the chords land between them, steady as feet on a parade ground. Rags are usually written in 2/4 or 4/4 time.

The right hand does something else entirely. It plays the tune, and the tune keeps leaning on the gaps between the beats.

Syncopation: accents between the beats

Syncopation means putting the stress of a rhythm somewhere the meter says it should not go: on an off-beat, between the beats, instead of on the beat itself. Open Music Theory defines it as a rhythm that contradicts the pattern of strong and weak beats set up by the meter, usually through accents or longer notes. An off-beat is any moment that is not a beat, such as the "and" between 1 and 2.

Here is the simplest syncopation there is, using the syllables from Lesson 2. Count 1, and, 2, and. A plain rhythm puts a note on each beat. The syncopated version uses a short note, a long note, a short note: ti, ta, ti. Look where the long note starts.

In the syncopated row the long note begins on the "and" and carries straight through beat 2, so nothing new happens on the beat. Your foot taps on 2 and hears no new sound. That little shock, the beat arriving with nothing on it while the accent comes a moment early, is what syncopation feels like. Clap it: clap on 1, clap on the "and", stay still on 2 while your foot taps, clap on the next "and".

Open Music Theory describes the commonest kind in pop music as straight syncopation: take a row of notes that fall on the beats and shift some of them early by half a beat. Ragtime does the same thing one level faster, with sixteenth notes and eighth notes in the right hand, while the left hand never shifts at all.

Why this matters: Syncopation only works because the pulse keeps going. The surprise of an accent between the beats depends on everyone still feeling where the beats are.

Two hands, two jobs

Put the two hands together and you have the engine of ragtime. One layer is completely regular. The other is full of syncopation. Each makes the other easier to hear: the steady left hand tells you where the beats are, so you notice every time the right hand dodges them.

This idea of stacking a steady layer and a syncopated layer did not stay in ragtime. A rock drummer's kick and backbeat are the steady layer; a singer's syncopated line rides on top. You will meet the same plan in jazz, in samba, in son from Cuba and in hip hop later in this course.

One more off-beat pattern is worth learning now, because you will hear it everywhere. Divide eight quick pulses into groups of 3, 3 and 2, and sound only the first pulse of each group. Open Music Theory calls this the tresillo, Spanish for "little three", and traces it to African and Cuban musical traditions. It feels almost like three even notes squeezed into the space of four, which is why it sounds both lopsided and smooth.

What the Maple Leaf Rag did next

The rag was published in the late summer of 1899, and in 1900 or 1901 Stark reissued it with a new cover showing a green maple leaf and a photograph of Joplin. Ragtime players began to treat it as the model of how a rag should be built. It is in four sections, called strains, like a march, and it starts in the key of A-flat major, moves to D-flat major for the third strain, called the trio, and comes home to A-flat at the end. Pianists still find it hard: in the trio the left hand has to leap two octaves at a time.

There is a famous story that the rag sold a million copies and made Joplin rich. The historian Edward A. Berlin checked, and the story does not hold up. The first printing of 400 copies took a year to sell, which at one cent a copy earned Joplin about four dollars. Sales then grew steadily, and by 1909 they may have brought him around 600 dollars a year: a real income, but not a fortune.

Joplin moved on to bigger plans, including an opera called Treemonisha, and died in New York City on 1 April 1917. His music faded for half a century. Then, in November 1970, the pianist Joshua Rifkin recorded an album of Joplin's rags for the Nonesuch label, with the Maple Leaf Rag as its first track. It became the label's first million-selling record and set off a ragtime revival. In 1976, nearly sixty years after his death, Joplin was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Listening guide: the Maple Leaf Rag, twice

• The United States Marine Band, 1906. The earliest recording of the rag that survives, made seven years after it was published and played by a wind band rather than a piano. It is on Wikimedia Commons as a public-domain file and lasts just under two minutes. The sound is crackly; listen past that for the low instruments playing a steady bass-and-chord pattern while the higher instruments play the tune that jumps off the beat.
• Joshua Rifkin, piano. Rifkin's recording is on the YouTube channel for his recordings, supplied by his record label, and runs about three minutes. Tap your foot on the left hand's bass notes. Then listen only to the right hand and notice how many of its accents land between your taps. When the music shifts into a new, warmer-sounding key, you have reached the third strain, the trio; listen for the left hand's big leaps there.
• A test for your ears: during any thirty seconds of either recording, try clapping only the right hand's accents while your foot keeps the left hand's pulse. If your clap and your foot rarely land together, you are hearing the syncopation.

Common misconceptions

• "Syncopation means playing out of time." It is exactly the opposite. A syncopated accent lands at a precise moment between the beats. Played sloppily, it just sounds wrong; played exactly, it sounds like ragtime.
• "Ragtime is the same thing as jazz." Ragtime came first and was usually written down note for note, for piano. Jazz, which grew up soon after in New Orleans, borrowed its syncopation but added improvisation, making up music on the spot.
• "An accent has to be the loudest note." Accents can come from loudness, but also from length or position. In ti, ta, ti, the long note feels accented because it is long and starts off the beat, even if you play it no louder.
• "The Maple Leaf Rag made Joplin rich overnight." The million-copy story is a myth. Its first printing took a year to sell, and the money came slowly.

What you now know

Ragtime grew up in African American communities in the 1890s and was built from two layers: a steady, march-like left hand of bass notes and chords, and a syncopated right-hand tune. Syncopation means putting the accent between the beats, so the meter's pattern of strong and weak beats is contradicted for a moment; it only works because the pulse carries on underneath. You can clap the basic syncopation as ti, ta, ti, with the long note starting on an "and" and covering the next beat, and you can play the tresillo, 3 + 3 + 2, which came into popular music from African and Cuban traditions. Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, published by John Stark in Sedalia in 1899, became the model rag. It did not make him rich, but after Joshua Rifkin's 1970 recording it made him famous again, and in 1976 it helped win him a Pulitzer Prize. Stacking a steady layer under a syncopated one is a plan you will find in almost every style still to come.

Sources

1. Hughes, B., Lavengood, M., and Shaffer, K. (n.d.). Rhythm and meter in pop music. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Gotham, M., Hamm, C., and Hughes, B. (n.d.). Other rhythmic essentials. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
3. United States Marine Band. (1906). Maple Leaf Rag [Audio recording, public domain]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
4. Rifkin, J. (n.d.). Maple Leaf Rag (Remastered) [Audio]. Joshua Rifkin, YouTube. youtube.com
5. Berlin, E. A. (2016). King of ragtime: Scott Joplin and his era (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Maple Leaf Rag; Scott Joplin; Ragtime. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On 7 May 1824, at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven stood on stage while his Ninth Symphony was played for the first time. He was almost completely deaf. Another conductor, Michael Umlauf, actually led the orchestra, and the players had been told to follow him, not Beethoven. At the end of one movement, or perhaps at the very end, reports differ, Beethoven was still beating time to music he could not hear. The young singer Caroline Unger walked over and gently turned him around so that he could see the audience applauding.

The last movement of that symphony contains one of the best-known tunes in the world, the Ode to Joy. Since 1972 it has been the anthem of the Council of Europe, and since 1985 the anthem of the European Union, played without words. A deaf composer could write it because he did not need to hear it: he could see it, as dots on five lines. By the end of this lesson you will be able to read the start of it the same way.

Five lines and four spaces

Music for most instruments is written on a staff (British musicians say stave): five horizontal lines with four spaces between them. Each line and each space stands for one pitch, meaning how high or low a note is. The higher a note sits on the staff, the higher it sounds. Count lines and spaces from the bottom up: line 1 is the bottom line and line 5 is the top.

Pitches are named with just seven letters: A, B, C, D, E, F and G. After G the letters start again at A. Open Music Theory explains why: musicians treat two notes eight letters apart as "the same note" at a higher or lower height. That distance is an octave, and you have heard it every time a man and a child sing the same tune together.

Moving up the staff, the letters go up one at a time, alternating line, space, line, space. If one line is E, the space above it is F and the next line is G. That single rule lets you work out any note once you know where one of them is. And that is the job of the clef.

The clef: which line is which

A clef is the sign at the start of every staff that pins one letter to one line. Without it, the five lines could mean anything.

• The treble clef curls around the second line from the bottom and fixes it as G, so it is also called the G clef. It is used for higher voices and instruments, such as the violin, the flute, the trumpet and the soprano voice.
• The bass clef has two dots on either side of the second line from the top and fixes that line as F, so it is also called the F clef. It is used for lower voices and instruments, such as the cello, the bassoon, the tuba and the bass voice.

From those anchors, every other line and space follows. Here are both staffs written out from the bottom up. The rhymes on the right are the ones Open Music Theory suggests for remembering them.

In short: The staff shows how high a note is; the clef tells you which letter each line and space stands for.

Ledger lines and middle C

What about notes too high or low to fit? You draw short extra lines, called ledger lines, that extend the staff upward or downward just for that note. The letters keep going in order, as if the staff simply continued.

The most important ledger-line note of all is middle C. It is the C nearest the middle of a piano keyboard. In the treble clef it sits on one ledger line just below the staff. In the bass clef it sits on one ledger line just above the staff. When a piano player's two staffs, treble on top and bass below, are joined by a bracket, they form the grand staff, and middle C is the meeting point between them.

Here is the full map of both staffs, with middle C in its two homes:

Worked example 1: the Ode to Joy in the treble clef

Beethoven wrote the tune in the key of D major, which needs a sharp; you will meet sharps in the next lesson. Here it is moved to C major, so it uses only the letters you already know, written in the treble clef in 4/4. Follow the procedure:

1. Find the clef. Treble, so line 2 is G.
2. Name each note from its position, using the map above.
3. Read the rhythm with the syllables from Lesson 2.
4. Check the shape. Does the melody go up or down where the dots do?

Look at what the positions tell you before you hear a note. The dots climb up from E to G, turn round and walk back down to middle C, then climb again. Every move is to the very next line or space. That is why this tune is so easy to sing: it never jumps. Bar 4 ends on D, which sounds unfinished, like a question. Bar 8 ends on C, which sounds settled, like an answer. You will learn why in Module 3.

Worked example 2: the same tune in the bass clef

Now change one thing: the clef. In the symphony, the tune is first played by the cellos and double basses on their own, low down, and their music is written in the bass clef. Move the tune down an octave into that clef and the letters stay exactly the same, but every dot moves.

So the first bar, E, E, F, G, sits on space 3, space 3, line 4, space 4 in the bass clef. The shape is the same, up by steps, but you have to read it with a different map. This is the most common reading mistake of all: reading a bass-clef note as if it were treble, which makes every note come out two letters wrong. A bass-clef line 1 is G, not E. Always look at the clef first.

The upshot: The same note names can sit in different places, and the same place can mean different notes. The clef decides.

Listening guide: Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, last movement

• The recording: the London Symphony Orchestra and chorus conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano, on the orchestra's official YouTube channel. The video is the last movement, about 24 minutes long.
• The opening: a loud, clashing outburst from the whole orchestra. Then the cellos and double basses play passages that sound almost like speech, as if they are arguing. Short scraps of the earlier movements appear and are pushed aside.
• The tune arrives: after a few minutes the cellos and double basses play the Ode to Joy melody quietly, with nothing else at all. This is the bass-clef version from worked example 2. Follow the shape: up by steps, down by steps, up again.
• It grows: the tune comes back again and again, each time with more instruments, higher up, until the whole orchestra plays it loudly. Listen for the moment it moves into the violins, which read the treble clef.
• The voice: then the orchestral outburst returns, and a single deep male voice sings for the first time in the symphony, with words Beethoven added himself. Soon the soloists and the chorus take up the tune, using Friedrich Schiller's poem An die Freude (To Joy), written in 1785.

Common misconceptions

• "Each line always means the same note." Only once you know the clef. Line 1 is E in the treble clef and G in the bass clef.
• "The treble clef is for the right hand and the bass clef is for the left hand, so they are piano things." Piano music does use them that way, but the clefs belong to every instrument and voice. A violinist reads treble clef and a cellist reads bass clef.
• "Middle C is in the middle of the staff." It is in the middle of the keyboard and of the grand staff. On either single staff it sits on a ledger line outside the five lines.
• "Reading music means you have to know the note names instantly." Beginners work them out from one known note and count up or down, and that is a perfectly good way to read. Speed comes from practice.

Recap

The staff is five lines and four spaces, and a note's height on it shows how high it sounds. Pitches use the letters A to G, repeating every octave. The clef pins one letter to one line: the treble or G clef makes line 2 a G, and the bass or F clef makes line 4 an F. From there the letters go up one per line and space: treble lines E, G, B, D, F and spaces F, A, C, E; bass lines G, B, D, F, A and spaces A, C, E, G. Ledger lines extend the staff, and middle C sits on one ledger line below the treble staff or above the bass staff, where the two meet in the grand staff. To read a melody, find the clef, name the notes from their positions, read the rhythm, and check the shape. The Ode to Joy, which Beethoven could only see, steps up from E to G and back down to C, and its first appearance, in the cellos and basses, is written in the bass clef.

Sources

1. Hamm, C. (n.d.). Reading clefs. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Hamm, C. (n.d.). The keyboard and the grand staff. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
3. London Symphony Orchestra and Pappano, A. (n.d.). Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, 'Ode to Joy' [Video]. London Symphony Orchestra, YouTube. youtube.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ode to Joy. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

In 1867, forty years after Beethoven died, a scholar named Ludwig Nohl published a short piano piece he had found. He said the manuscript was headed "Für Elise am 27 April" with Beethoven's name, and dated 1810. That manuscript has since been lost, and nobody knows for certain who Elise was: researchers have suggested Therese Malfatti, Elisabeth Röckel and Elise Barensfeld. But almost everyone on earth knows how the piece begins. One note wobbles against its nearest neighbour: E, then the note just below it, then E again, then the note below, then E.

Try to pick that tune out on a piano using only the white keys and you will almost get it. The result sounds plain and slightly wrong, and working out exactly why it is wrong teaches you how the whole keyboard works.

A wrong answer that sounds almost right

Here is a sensible first attempt. "The tune starts on E. The note below E is D. So the wobble is E, D, E, D, E." Play E, D, E, D, E, B, D, C, A on white keys and the shape is right, but the wobble is wider and flatter than the one you know. Something in the reasoning failed. To find where, you need a map of the keyboard.

The keyboard as a map

Look at any piano or keyboard and you will see that the black keys come in groups of two and three, all the way along. That pattern is your map. The white key just to the left of every group of two black keys is C. From there the white keys run C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then C again, one octave higher.

Count every key, black and white, from one C up to the next and you get twelve different keys before the pattern repeats: seven white and five black. Here they are in order, with the names Open Music Theory gives the black keys:

Half steps and whole steps

The distance from any key to the very next key, black or white, is a half step, also called a semitone. It is the smallest distance in Western music: one twelfth of an octave. A whole step, or tone, is two half steps: from a key to the one after next.

Now look at the white keys only. Between most pairs of neighbouring white keys sits a black key, so those white keys are a whole step apart. But in two places there is no black key in between, and that is the key fact of this lesson:

That is also why the black keys fall into groups of two and three: the gaps in the groups are exactly where E meets F and B meets C.

The upshot: Neighbouring white keys are not all the same distance apart. E to F and B to C are half steps; every other pair is a whole step.

Tracing the mistake

Go back to the first attempt. The reasoning said "the note below E is D". On the white keys that is true, but D is a whole step below E: there is a black key in between. Beethoven's wobble is smaller than that. It moves to the key immediately to the left of E, a half step down, which is the black key between D and E.

So the real opening is E, D sharp, E, D sharp, E, then B, D, C, A. The wobble is a half step, and that is why it sounds so close, almost like a shiver: the two notes are neighbours with nothing between them. Wikipedia's article on the piece calls that D sharp one of the most recognizable openings in classical music.

Key idea: To move by the smallest possible step, go to the very next key, whatever its colour. Assuming "the next letter" is always the next note is the mistake.

Sharps, flats and naturals

To write that black key, music uses an accidental, a sign placed just to the left of a note on the staff. Open Music Theory defines the three common ones:

• A sharp (♯), which looks like a tilted hash sign, raises a note by a half step. D sharp is the key just above D.
• A flat (♭), which looks like a slanted lower-case b, lowers a note by a half step. E flat is the key just below E.
• A natural (♮) cancels a sharp or flat and brings the note back to its plain white-key form.

One rule trips up almost every beginner: an accidental keeps working for every later note on the same line or space until the next bar line. That is exactly what happens in the first full bar of Für Elise. The bar contains E, D sharp, E, B, D, C. The second D must be a plain D, so Beethoven's score puts a natural sign in front of it. Without the natural, the sharp from earlier in the bar would still apply.

One key, two names

Every black key has two names: the key between D and E is both D sharp and E flat. Notes that sound the same but are spelled differently are called enharmonic. Even white keys can have other names: Open Music Theory points out that F can be written E sharp and C can be written B sharp, because each is a half step above E and B.

Why does Beethoven write D sharp, not E flat? Because of the note's job. It is a step below E that leans back up to E, so musicians name it from the D below. Wikipedia describes it as a lower neighbour of E. The choice of name tells a reader which note it belongs to.

There is a fun theory here, reported in Wikipedia's article on the piece. The organ scholar Johannes Quack noticed that in German the note E flat is called Es, which sounds like the letter S. Spell ELISE using only the letters that are also note names and you get E, S, E: E, E flat, E. By enharmonic equivalence that sounds exactly like E, D sharp, E, the opening of the piece. It is a clever idea. Nobody can prove Beethoven meant it.

Listening guide: Für Elise

• The recording: the pianist Alice Sara Ott, on the official YouTube channel of the record label Deutsche Grammophon. It lasts about three minutes.
• The opening section: the half-step wobble, E and D sharp, then the fall down to A. Listen for the left hand answering each phrase with notes that climb upward. The piece is in A minor and in 3/8 time, so the music moves in quick groups of three.
• Two contrasting sections: Wikipedia describes the piece as a rondo, a form where the opening section keeps returning: A, B, A, C, A. The B section moves to a brighter key, F major, and ends with fast runs. The C section sits over a low note repeated again and again in the bass, and sounds darker and more insistent.
• The slide before the last return: just before the opening comes back for the final time, listen for a run that climbs up and then slides down over two octaves, key by key. Sliding down by half steps like that, through every black and white key, is called a chromatic scale.

Common misconceptions

• "Black keys are the sharps and flats, white keys are the naturals." Mostly, but not always. Each black key has a sharp name and a flat name, and white keys can be spelled as sharps or flats too, such as E sharp for F.
• "Every pair of neighbouring white keys is a whole step apart." E to F and B to C are half steps. Forgetting this is the commonest reason a scale comes out wrong.
• "Sharp just means a bit too high." In everyday speech, a singer who is "sharp" is slightly out of tune. In written music a sharp raises a note by exactly one half step.
• "Once a sharp appears, it lasts for the whole piece." An accidental lasts only until the next bar line. Sharps or flats that last a whole piece are written at the start, in a key signature, which you will meet in Module 3.

Where this leaves us

The keyboard repeats a pattern of twelve keys, seven white and five black, and the black keys in groups of two and three show you where you are: C is the white key just left of each group of two. A half step is the distance to the very next key, a whole step is two half steps, and on the white keys E to F and B to C are half steps with no black key between. A sharp raises a note by a half step, a flat lowers it by a half step, and a natural cancels either, and an accidental lasts until the next bar line. Every black key has two enharmonic names, and composers choose the name that shows where the note is going. The opening of Für Elise is a half-step wobble, E and D sharp, which is why picking it out on white keys alone sounds wrong. With the twelve keys and the two kinds of step, you are ready to build scales.

Sources

1. Hamm, C. (n.d.). Half steps, whole steps, and accidentals. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Hamm, C. (n.d.). The keyboard and the grand staff. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
3. Ott, A. S. (n.d.). Beethoven: Für Elise, WoO 59 [Video]. Deutsche Grammophon, YouTube. youtube.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Für Elise. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Accidental (music). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On 23 March 1792, in the Hanover Square Rooms in London, Joseph Haydn sat at a fortepiano, an early kind of piano, and led an orchestra through his brand-new symphony, now numbered 94. Haydn was the most famous composer in Europe and was on his first visit to England. He also had a rival in town. His own former student, Ignaz Pleyel, had started a competing concert series a week earlier.

The second movement of the new symphony began with a simple, tiptoeing tune, played quietly. Then the tune was played again, even more quietly, with the low strings plucking their notes. Then, on the last chord of the phrase, the whole orchestra came in at full force, with a crash from the kettledrums. In German the piece is still called the symphony "with the kettledrum stroke". In English it became the Surprise Symphony.

The surprise works because of a single kind of musical instruction: how loud to play. This lesson is about the words and signs that tell musicians not which notes to play, but how to play them.

Dynamics: the volume instructions

Dynamics means how loud or soft the music is. Composers write dynamics with Italian words, usually shortened to letters under the staff. The two basic words are piano, soft, and forte, loud. Open Music Theory explains how the rest are built: mezzo means moderately, and the ending -issimo means very.

Composers can stack the ending for extremes: ppp is softer than pp, and fff is louder than ff. Gradual changes are written with words or with long, thin wedge shapes that musicians call hairpins. A crescendo (cresc.) means get gradually louder; its hairpin opens out to the right. A decrescendo or diminuendo (dim.) means get gradually softer; its hairpin closes to a point.

Notice that these are relative, not measured. There is no decibel number for forte. Forte on a flute and forte from a whole brass section are very different amounts of sound. What matters is the contrast: pp is quieter than p, which is quieter than mf.

What Haydn did with them

The Andante of the Surprise Symphony is in 2/4 and in C major. Its theme is two short sections of eight bars, and each section is played twice. Here is the trick, step by step:

1. The first time, the violins play the tune p, with short, separated notes.
2. The repeat is marked pp, and the lower strings pluck their strings instead of bowing them, so the sound becomes even thinner and quieter.
3. At the end of that quiet repeat, in bar 16, the rest of the orchestra suddenly joins the violins on one chord, marked ff, with the kettledrums.
4. Then the music goes straight back to its quiet tune as if nothing had happened.

The plan only works because Haydn made you lean in first. By making the repeat quieter than the start, he got the audience listening hard, and that is exactly when a fortissimo chord hits hardest. The joke is never repeated in the variations that follow.

Worth holding on to: Dynamics are about contrast. A loud chord surprises because of the quiet that comes before it.

Why did Haydn do it?

A popular story says Haydn wrote the bang to wake up people who had dozed off at his concerts. It is a good story. The best evidence we have says it is not true. In his old age, Haydn's biographer Georg August Griesinger asked him straight out whether the surprise was meant to wake the audience. Haydn said no: he had wanted to surprise the public with something new and make a brilliant start to his season, so that Pleyel's concerts would not outshine his. He added that the audience shouted for the Andante to be played again, and that Pleyel himself complimented him on the idea.

Haydn's answer comes from the composer himself, which makes it strong evidence, though he gave it many years later and may have remembered the evening in his own favour. The waking-up story has no source of that kind behind it. When a famous anecdote and a first-hand account disagree, the first-hand account usually wins, unless other evidence turns up.

Articulation: how each note starts and ends

Articulation is how notes are joined or separated, and how hard each one starts. Open Music Theory lists the main signs:

String players have two more instructions you will hear in both pieces today. Pizzicato (pizz.) means pluck the string with a finger instead of using the bow. Arco means go back to the bow.

Try articulation with your voice right now. Sing any five notes on "la" as staccato: la. la. la. la. la. Then sing them legato, gliding from one to the next without a gap. Same notes, same speed, completely different character.

Tempo words and tempo changes

In Lesson 1 you measured tempo in beats per minute. Composers have also used Italian words for centuries, written at the top of the music. Open Music Theory groups the common ones like this:

Haydn's Andante is a walking pace. Add -issimo and you get the extremes: prestissimo means as fast as possible. Two more words change the tempo while the music is going: accelerando (accel.) means gradually get faster, and ritardando (rit.) means gradually get slower. A tempo means go back to the original speed. And a fermata, a curved line with a dot under it placed over a note, means hold this note longer than its written value, for as long as feels right.

Grieg: one long crescendo that speeds up

In 1875 the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg wrote music for a production of Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt. In one scene, the hero Peer stumbles into the hall of the Mountain King, packed with trolls, goblins and gnomes who grow more and more furious with him. Grieg's music for that scene, In the Hall of the Mountain King, uses almost nothing but dynamics and tempo to tell the story.

It is in the key of B minor. The tune starts slowly and quietly in the lowest instruments of the orchestra: cellos and double basses plucking pizzicato, with the bassoons. The same short tune repeats over and over, moving higher and passing to other instruments. All the while the music gets louder, a long crescendo, and faster, a long accelerando, until it ends prestissimo in a loud, wild rush. Grieg later joked in a letter that he could hardly bear to hear the piece, but audiences have loved it ever since.

The point: Haydn's surprise is a sudden change of dynamics. Grieg's trolls are a gradual one, with the tempo climbing at the same time.

Listening guide: two ways to use loud and soft

• Haydn, Symphony No. 94, Surprise, played by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelsons, on the official YouTube channel of DW Classical Music, Germany's international public broadcaster. The video is the whole symphony, about 25 minutes. The Andante is the second movement: the quiet, tiptoeing tune that follows the fast first movement. Listen for the even quieter repeat with plucked low strings, then the ff chord. Afterwards, count the variations that follow: Wikipedia describes four, including a stormy one in a minor key with trumpets and drums.
• Grieg, In the Hall of the Mountain King, played by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in a recording made for Musopen and released into the public domain, on Wikimedia Commons. It lasts about two and a half minutes. Tap the pulse from the first note and keep tapping. Can you feel your tapping speed up? Mark on paper, every time you notice, whether the music is p, mf, f or ff.

Common misconceptions

• "Piano means play on the piano." As a dynamic, piano means soft. The instrument's full name is pianoforte, soft-loud, because early pianos could play both, unlike the harpsichord before it.
• "Getting louder means getting faster." A crescendo is a change of volume only. Grieg does both at once, but he writes them separately, and you can practise a crescendo at a steady tempo.
• "Staccato means fast." Staccato means short and separated. A slow piece can be staccato and a fast piece can be legato.
• "Haydn wrote the bang to wake people up." When asked directly, Haydn said he wanted to surprise the public with something new and win the rivalry with Pleyel's concerts.

Summing up

Composers use Italian words and signs to say how to play the notes. Dynamics run from pp, very soft, through p, mp, mf and f to ff, very loud, and a crescendo or decrescendo changes the volume gradually; all of them are relative, and their power comes from contrast. Articulation says how notes start and connect: legato smooth, staccato short, accent with extra force, tenuto full and leaned on, and string players add pizzicato for plucked notes. Tempo words run from slow, like largo and adagio, through andante and moderato to fast, like allegro and presto, while accelerando speeds up, ritardando slows down and a fermata holds a note. Haydn's Surprise Symphony, first played in London on 23 March 1792, makes a quiet repeat even quieter and then hits a ff chord, and by his own account he did it to surprise his audience, not to wake it. Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King does the opposite, growing gradually louder and faster until the trolls run riot.

Sources

1. Gotham, M., and Hamm, C. (n.d.). Other aspects of notation. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Nelsons, A. (n.d.). Haydn: Symphony No. 94 "Surprise" [Video]. DW Classical Music, YouTube. youtube.com
3. Czech National Symphony Orchestra (as the Musopen Symphony Orchestra). (2012). Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain King [Audio recording, public domain]. Musopen, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Symphony No. 94 (Haydn). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). In the Hall of the Mountain King. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Griesinger, G. A. (1968). Biographical notes concerning Joseph Haydn (V. Gotwals, Trans.). In Haydn: Two contemporary portraits. University of Wisconsin Press. (Original work published 1810)

In Boston in 1839, a music teacher named Lowell Mason published a hymn tune he called Antioch, marked "from Handel". Today almost everyone knows it as the tune of the Christmas carol Joy to the World, and the hymn database Hymnary.org lists it in more than a thousand hymnals. Its first eight notes do something very simple. They walk straight down, one step at a time, from one note to the note an octave below. In the key Mason used, D major, those notes are D, C sharp, B, A, G, F sharp, E, D.

That walk down is a complete major scale, and it is the most useful pattern in Western music. By the end of this lesson you will be able to build one starting on any key of the piano, and read the signs at the start of a piece that tell you which scale it uses.

What a scale is

A scale is a set of notes arranged in order of pitch, going up or down, usually from one note to the same note an octave higher or lower. The starting note gives the scale its name and is called the tonic, or home note. A song in "the key of D major" uses the notes of the D major scale and treats D as home, the note where it sounds finished.

In Lesson 6 you learned the two kinds of step: a half step to the very next key and a whole step to the key after next. Every major scale, whatever note it starts on, follows the same pattern of steps going up. Open Music Theory gives it as:

Say it until it sticks: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. The two half steps fall between notes 3 and 4 and between notes 7 and 8. Everything else is whole steps.

C major: the scale with no black keys

Start on C and play only white keys up to the next C: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. Check the steps against Lesson 6. C to D is whole, D to E whole, E to F half, F to G whole, G to A whole, A to B whole, B to C half. That is exactly the major pattern, because the two white-key half steps, E to F and B to C, happen to land in the right places. So C major is the one major scale that needs no sharps or flats.

Each note of the scale has a number, called a scale degree, and a sung name, called solfège. Musicians use both so they can talk about a tune in any key.

Hymnary.org writes the opening of Antioch as the numbers 1, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1: the top do, then ti, la, sol, fa, mi, re, do. Sing it on solfège and you have sung a major scale downward. Notice degree 7, ti. It sits only a half step below the top do and seems to lean up toward it, which is why it is called the leading tone.

Worked example 1: build G major

Now start somewhere else and let the pattern decide which keys you need. Here is the procedure:

1. Write the eight letter names in order from the starting note: G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Use every letter once.
2. Check each step against whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half.
3. Wherever a step is the wrong size, add a sharp or flat to fix it, without changing the letter.

The first five steps are fine. The last two are the wrong way round: E to F is a half step but should be whole, and F to G is a whole step but should be half. Raise F by a half step to F sharp and both are fixed at once. E to F sharp is now whole, and F sharp to G is half. So G major is G, A, B, C, D, E, F sharp, G: one sharp.

Worked example 2: change the start, flip the answer

Change one input, the starting note, to F, and run the same procedure. F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F on white keys gives: F to G whole, G to A whole, A to B whole, B to C half, then whole, whole, half. The problem is now in the first half of the scale. A to B should be a half step and B to C should be whole.

This time the fix is to lower B by a half step to B flat. A to B flat is half, and B flat to C is whole. So F major is F, G, A, B flat, C, D, E, F: one flat. Starting on G needed a sharp; starting on F needs a flat. Same pattern, opposite fix.

Why B flat, and not A sharp, which is the same key? Because every major scale uses each letter exactly once. A sharp would give the scale two A's and no B.

The core of it: Every major scale follows whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Write one of each letter, then add the sharps or flats that make the steps fit.

Key signatures: write the sharps once

A piece in G major would need a sharp on nearly every F. Instead of writing it each time, composers put a key signature at the start of every line of music, right after the clef and before the time signature. It lists the sharps or flats the key needs, and they apply to every note with that letter, in every octave, for the whole piece, unless an accidental changes one.

Here are the major keys you are most likely to meet, each built with the procedure above:

Sharps and flats always appear in a fixed order, which Open Music Theory gives as F, C, G, D, A, E, B for sharps and the reverse, B, E, A, D, G, C, F, for flats. Two shortcuts then name the key from the signature:

• Sharp keys: the last sharp is a half step below the tonic. Two sharps end on C sharp; a half step up is D, so the key is D major.
• Flat keys: the second-to-last flat is the tonic. Three flats are B flat, E flat, A flat; the second-to-last is E flat, so the key is E flat major. One flat has no second-to-last, so just learn it: one flat is F major.

Listening guide: Joy to the World

• The recording: the United States Army Chorus, from the Army Band's album Christmas with the Chorus, a public-domain recording on Wikimedia Commons. It lasts about a minute and a quarter.
• The first phrase: the whole major scale coming down, do, ti, la, sol, fa, mi, re, do. Sing the solfège quietly along with the choir.
• Where it settles: notice how finished the music sounds when it lands on do. That is what a tonic feels like.
• The climb back: later in the tune the melody climbs back up through the same scale notes. Listen for the moment it reaches the top do again.

Common misconceptions

• "Major scales are just the white keys." Only C major is. Every other major scale needs at least one black key to keep the pattern whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half.
• "You can use any name for the black key you need." In a scale each letter is used once. G major uses F sharp, not G flat, because it already has a G.
• "The key signature only affects the notes on the line where the sharp is written." A sharp on the F line in the key signature makes every F in every octave an F sharp.
• "Do is always C." In the system used here, called movable do, do is the tonic of whatever key you are in. In D major, do is D.

Pulling it together

A scale is a set of notes in order of pitch, and its first note, the tonic, is home. Every major scale follows whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half, with half steps between degrees 3 and 4 and between 7 and 8. Scale degrees number the notes 1 to 7, and solfège sings them do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. To build a major scale on any note, write each letter once, check the steps and add the sharps or flats that make them fit: G major needs F sharp and F major needs B flat. A key signature lists those sharps or flats once at the start of each line, and they apply to every octave for the whole piece. Sharps appear in the order F, C, G, D, A, E, B and flats in the order B, E, A, D, G, C, F; the last sharp is a half step below the tonic, and the second-to-last flat is the tonic. The opening of Joy to the World is a whole D major scale walking down from do to do.

Sources

1. Hamm, C., and Hughes, B. (n.d.). Major scales, scale degrees, and key signatures. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Hymnary.org. (n.d.). ANTIOCH (Handel) [Tune information: adapter Lowell Mason; key D major; incipit 17654 32156 67711]. hymnary.org
3. United States Army Chorus. (n.d.). Joy to the World, from Christmas with the Chorus [Audio recording, public domain]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Joy to the World. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On 20 November 1889 in Budapest, Gustav Mahler conducted the first performance of his First Symphony. When the third movement began, the audience heard something few people had ever heard in a symphony: a double bass playing a solo, high and quiet, over a soft drumbeat. The tune it played was one almost everyone knew, the children's round Frère Jacques, which Mahler called Bruder Martin. But it sounded wrong, or rather it sounded sad. It moved slowly, like a funeral march, and it was in a minor key.

Mahler had changed just a couple of notes of the tune. Wikipedia's article on the symphony adds a twist that surprises most people: singing this round in minor was not Mahler's invention. It was how the round was commonly sung in Austria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Either way, the difference between the bright version and the dark one comes down to a few half steps, and that is what this lesson is about.

The same tune, two versions

Here is the opening of Frère Jacques in D major, and in D minor, the key Mahler's movement begins in. Read the two rows side by side and look for the differences:

Only two notes change. F sharp becomes F, and B becomes B flat. Both drop by a half step. In scale degrees, they are degree 3 and degree 6: in solfège, mi becomes me and la becomes le. Everything else, the rhythm, the shape, the round itself, stays the same. Yet the mood flips.

Major and minor side by side

Open Music Theory gives the step pattern of the natural minor scale as whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole. Compare it with the major pattern from the last lesson, and with the two most common five-note scales, built on white keys so you can play them at once:

(W means whole step and H means half step.)

Reading the table

The third note decides first. Open Music Theory puts it simply: a minor scale's third note is always a half step lower than the third note of the major scale with the same name. From C, the major third note is E; the minor third note is E flat. That one note is the quickest way to hear which is which.

Natural minor lowers three notes. Compared with major on the same tonic, natural minor lowers degrees 3, 6 and 7. That is why its solfège has three new syllables: me, le and te.

Harmonic minor puts one back. Composers in minor keys often raise degree 7 again, so it sits a half step below the tonic and leans into it, just like ti in major. Open Music Theory calls this form harmonic minor. It leaves a wide gap of three half steps between degrees 6 and 7, a sound you can hear in a lot of dramatic music.

Pentatonic scales have no half steps at all. A pentatonic scale has five notes instead of seven. The major pentatonic is the major scale without degrees 4 and 7, the two notes that sit a half step from a neighbour. With no half steps, any of its notes can follow any other and nothing clashes. Its pattern fits exactly onto the five black keys of the piano, which is why you can improvise on the black keys alone and always sound fine.

Bottom line: Major and minor differ by half steps in particular places, above all the third note. Pentatonic scales leave out the half steps entirely.

Two kinds of family: relative and parallel

Major and minor keys are connected in two ways, and Open Music Theory names both.

• Relative keys share a key signature. C major and A minor both have no sharps or flats; they use the same seven notes but treat a different one as home. The tonic of the relative minor is always three half steps below the major tonic: count C, B, B flat, A. Likewise F major and D minor share one flat, B flat.
• Parallel keys share a tonic. D major and D minor both treat D as home, but D minor has the lowered notes. Mahler's change, from the D major tune everyone knew to his D minor funeral march, is a parallel change.

Do minor keys always sound sad?

No, and you already have proof. Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King from Lesson 7 is in B minor, and it is wild and comic rather than sad. In Western music minor keys are often used for sad, serious or spooky moods, and major keys for bright ones, but these are habits that listeners learn, not laws of nature, and composers break them all the time. Mahler's movement is a good example: it is a funeral march, but partway through a cheerful village-band tune barges in. Wikipedia notes that the movement may have been inspired by an old woodcut of animals carrying a hunter's coffin. Mahler was mixing grief and parody on purpose.

Pentatonic scales have their own long reach. Wikipedia's list of music that uses them runs from Celtic, Hungarian and Nordic folk songs to West African music, African American spirituals, the blues, rock and Hindustani classical music, and the melody of the hymn Amazing Grace is pentatonic. You will meet the minor pentatonic again in the blues lesson, where it is the starting point for the blues scale.

Listening guide: Mahler, Symphony No. 1, third movement

• The recording: the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Daniel Harding, in the Symphonic Gems series on the orchestra's official YouTube channel. It lasts about eleven minutes.
• The opening: the timpani (kettledrums) tap two notes again and again, the tonic and the note below it, like a slow, steady tread. Then the solo double bass plays the minor round. Hum the major version you know in your head and notice the two notes that have sunk.
• The round: as in Frère Jacques, other instruments enter one after another with the same tune: Wikipedia lists the bassoon, then the tuba, and eventually the whole orchestra. An oboe adds a separate tune over the top.
• The interruption: suddenly the mood changes and you hear something like a small village band, with cymbal, bass drum, clarinets and a pair of trumpets. Then the music turns calmer and brighter in a major key before the funeral march returns.

Common misconceptions

• "Minor means sad, major means happy, always." These are common associations in Western music, not rules. The Mountain King is minor and wild; plenty of happy dance music is in minor.
• "A minor scale is the major scale played backwards." Playing C major downward is still C major. Minor has its own step pattern, whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole.
• "Relative minor and parallel minor are the same thing." Relative keys share a key signature (C major and A minor). Parallel keys share a tonic (D major and D minor).
• "Mahler invented the minor version of Frère Jacques." According to Wikipedia's article on the symphony, the round was commonly sung in minor in Austria in his time.

Looking back

Frère Jacques in D major becomes Mahler's funeral march in D minor by lowering just two notes, F sharp to F and B to B flat, which are degrees 3 and 6. The natural minor scale follows whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole, and compared with major on the same tonic it lowers degrees 3, 6 and 7, sung me, le and te. Harmonic minor raises degree 7 again so it leads into the tonic. A minor scale's third note is always a half step below the major one, which is the quickest way to tell them apart. Relative keys, like C major and A minor, share a key signature, with the minor tonic three half steps below the major one; parallel keys, like D major and D minor, share a tonic. Pentatonic scales use five notes and no half steps: the major pentatonic is do, re, mi, sol, la, and it fits the piano's black keys. Minor often sounds darker to Western ears, but that is a habit composers use and break, as Mahler does when his village band barges into the funeral.

Sources

1. Hamm, C., and Hughes, B. (n.d.). Minor scales, scale degrees, and key signatures. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Hamm, C. (n.d.). Introduction to diatonic modes and the chromatic scale [The pentatonic collection]. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
3. Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Harding, D. (n.d.). Symphonic Gems: Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1 'Titan', III [Video]. Concertgebouworkest, YouTube. youtube.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Symphony No. 1 (Mahler). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Pentatonic scale. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Sometime between 1680 and 1706, nobody knows exactly when, the German organist Johann Pachelbel wrote a piece for three violins and a bass part. The bass part is eight notes long: D, A, B, F sharp, G, D, G, A. It is played 28 times in a row without changing. Above it, the three violins play the same tune one after another, each starting two bars after the last. That is the whole piece.

For over two centuries almost nobody played it. Then in 1968 a French chamber orchestra led by Jean-François Paillard recorded a slow, romantic version, and the Canon in D became one of the most-played pieces of music on earth. The same year, the Greek band Aphrodite's Child turned its harmonies into a pop hit called Rain and Tears, and pop songwriters have been borrowing them ever since.

Here is the puzzle. How can eight bass notes, repeated 28 times, hold up a whole piece without getting boring? And how can so many different songs, centuries apart, share the same few harmonies? The answer is chords.

What a chord is

Harmony means notes sounding at the same time. A chord is a group of three or more notes played together. The most common chord is the triad, a three-note chord. Open Music Theory describes how to build one: start on any note, skip the next letter, take the one after, skip again, take the next. From C you get C, E, G. On the staff, a triad stacked this way sits on three lines in a row or three spaces in a row, like a little snowman.

The three notes have names. The bottom note, the one the chord is built on, is the root. The middle note is the third, because it is three letters above the root (C, D, E). The top note is the fifth, five letters above (C, D, E, F, G). The chord is named after its root: C, E, G is a C chord.

Major, minor and diminished

Triads built from the same letters can sound very different, because the steps between the letters are not all the same size. Count the half steps on your keyboard from Lesson 6:

Major and minor triads use the same two sizes of gap, just in the opposite order. That links straight back to the last lesson: a major chord has the major third note, and a minor chord has the lowered one. Change C, E, G to C, E flat, G and you have turned C major into C minor.

The seven chords of a key

Build a triad on every note of the C major scale, using only the notes of that scale, and you get seven chords. Musicians label them with Roman numerals that show which scale degree the root is on. Open Music Theory's convention is the one most musicians use: a capital numeral for a major chord, a small one for a minor chord and a small circle for diminished.

Every major key has the same pattern of qualities: major on I, IV and V; minor on ii, iii and vi; diminished on vii. That is why Roman numerals are so useful. "I, IV, V" means the same thing in every key, whatever the letters.

What matters here: A triad is a root, a third and a fifth. Built on each note of a major scale, the triads come out major on I, IV and V, minor on ii, iii and vi, and diminished on vii.

Solving the puzzle: Pachelbel's eight chords

Now look at Pachelbel's bass line again: D, A, B, F sharp, G, D, G, A. The piece is in D major. Wikipedia's analysis of the Canon shows that each bass note is the root of a chord, giving a progression of eight chords. A chord progression is a series of chords in order.

So the piece is a ladder of chords that ends on V, the chord that most wants to go home to I, which is exactly where the pattern starts again. Each time round, the violins play something new over the same harmonies: slower notes, then faster ones, then leaping patterns. The chords stay put while the tunes change, and the ear never gets tired of either. Wikipedia notes that this kind of sequence was a common pattern in Pachelbel's time; music historians call it the Romanesca.

Why so many songs share a few chords

Write out the notes of the three major chords in C major, I, IV and V:

• I: C, E, G
• IV: F, A, C
• V: G, B, D

Put them together and you have C, D, E, F, G, A, B: every note of the scale. Whatever note a melody in C major lands on, at least one of those three chords contains it. That is the solution to the second half of the puzzle. Three chords can support almost any tune in a key, so countless songs, from hymns to folk songs to the twelve-bar blues you will meet later, are built on I, IV and V. Add vi, the minor chord, and you have the four chords that Open Music Theory's chapter on pop harmony calls the most common chords in all of pop music.

Listening guide: Pachelbel, Canon in D

• The recording: the Strolling Strings of the United States Air Force Band, in an arrangement by Frank Hudson, from the album The Strolling Strings 50th Anniversary (2004). It is a public-domain recording on Wikimedia Commons and lasts just under four minutes.
• The bass: find the low line of eight slow notes and hum it: D, A, B, F sharp, G, D, G, A. Then hum it again. Count how many times it comes round in the first minute.
• The chords: listen for the moment the music sounds most "ready to go home". That is the A major chord, V, at the end of each round, just before it starts again on D.
• The tunes on top: in Pachelbel's original, the violins enter one after another and their notes get busier each time round. In this arrangement for a larger group of strings, listen for how the tune passes between higher instruments and gets faster, while the bass never changes.

Common misconceptions

• "A chord is any three notes." Three random notes are a cluster, not a triad. A triad stacks every other letter: root, third, fifth.
• "Minor chords are major chords played lower." A minor chord can be as high as you like. What makes it minor is the gap from root to third: 3 half steps instead of 4.
• "Using the same chords as another song is copying." Chord progressions like I, IV, V or Pachelbel's sequence are shared building blocks. What makes a song yours is the melody, the rhythm and the words you build on top.
• "Roman numerals are for classical music only." Guitarists, pop producers and jazz players all use them, because "I, V, vi, IV" works in every key.

The takeaway

Harmony is notes sounding together, and a chord is three or more of them. A triad stacks every other letter: root, third and fifth. A major triad has 4 half steps then 3, a minor triad 3 then 4, and a diminished triad 3 and 3. Built on each degree of a major scale, the triads follow one pattern: major on I, IV and V, minor on ii, iii and vi, diminished on vii, and Roman numerals let that pattern travel to every key. Pachelbel's Canon repeats an eight-note bass that is really a progression of eight chords, I, V, vi, iii, IV, I, IV, V in D major, and keeps it fresh by changing the tunes above. Because I, IV and V together contain every note of the scale, those three chords can carry almost any melody, which is why so many songs share them.

Sources

1. Hamm, C. (n.d.). Triads. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Brady, S., Hamm, C., Lavengood, M., and Shaffer, K. (n.d.). Roman numerals. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
3. Hughes, B. (n.d.). Four-chord schemas. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
4. United States Air Force Band, Strolling Strings. (2004). Canon (J. Pachelbel, arr. F. Hudson), from The Strolling Strings 50th Anniversary [Audio recording, public domain]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Pachelbel's Canon. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On the evening of 22 December 1808, the auditorium of the Theater an der Wien in Vienna was bitterly cold. Ludwig van Beethoven was putting on a concert made entirely of his own music, all of it new, and it lasted more than four hours. The orchestra had managed only one rehearsal. In one piece, after a player made a mistake, Beethoven stopped everyone and started again. Somewhere in that long, freezing night, the audience heard for the first time the four notes that are now probably the most famous in all of Western music: three short and one long, the opening of his Fifth Symphony.

The reviews that night were cautious. But within two years the writer and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann was calling the symphony one of the most important works of the time. A big part of the reason is how much Beethoven built from those four notes. This lesson takes them apart.

A motif: four notes that do a lot of work

The opening is three quick G's and a long E flat, then three quick F's and a long D. Each long note is held under a fermata, so the music seems to stop and stare at you. In the rhythm syllables from Lesson 2, each knock is ti, ti, ti, then a long held note; Wikipedia describes it simply as short-short-short-long.

A short musical idea like this, small enough to remember and strong enough to build with, is called a motif. Wikipedia's article on the symphony notes that most of the first movement's themes are developed from this one motif. You hear it again and again, piled up in different instruments, turned around, stretched and squeezed. It even returns, in a new disguise, in the third movement.

There is a famous story that Beethoven said the opening was fate knocking at the door. The story comes from Anton Schindler, Beethoven's secretary, who wrote it down many years after Beethoven died. Historians are wary of it, because Schindler is believed to have forged entries in Beethoven's conversation notebooks. The four notes have meant other things too. In the Second World War the BBC played the rhythm on drums at the start of broadcasts to secret agents, because short-short-short-long is the Morse code for the letter V, for victory.

So what?: You do not need a long tune to write a great melody. One short motif, repeated and changed, can hold together a whole movement.

Repetition and sequence

Look at the two knocks side by side, written as letter names and as positions on the treble staff from Lesson 5:

The second knock is the first one moved down a step. Same rhythm, same shape, new starting note. Repeating a pattern starting on a different note is called a sequence, and it is one of the commonest ways composers stretch a small idea into a longer one. Plain repetition, playing exactly the same notes again, is useful too, but a sequence keeps the ear interested because something has moved.

Look closely and you will find a detail. G down to E flat is a gap of 4 half steps, but F down to D is only 3. Beethoven keeps both knocks inside the key of C minor, so the shape is the same while the exact size of the drop changes slightly. Most sequences work this way.

Steps, leaps and contour

Melodies move in two ways. A step moves to the very next letter, up or down, like E to F. A leap jumps over at least one letter, like G down to E flat, which skips F. In Lesson 5 you met a melody made almost entirely of steps, the Ode to Joy. The Fifth Symphony's motif does the opposite: it repeats one note and then leaps.

The overall shape a melody draws as it rises and falls is called its contour. You can sketch it with one line in the air.

Steps tend to sound smooth and singable. Leaps sound bold, and they draw attention. Most good tunes mix the two: a leap, then a few steps that fill in the gap.

Phrases and cadences: questions and answers

A phrase is a musical sentence: a stretch of melody that feels complete enough to take a breath after. Phrases end with a cadence, which Open Music Theory compares to punctuation. It names two main kinds. An inconclusive cadence, also called a half cadence, ends on the V chord and sounds like a comma or a question mark. A conclusive cadence, called an authentic cadence, goes from V to I and sounds like a full stop.

You have already sung one of each. Go back to the Ode to Joy in Lesson 5. Bar 4 ends E, D, D, stopping on re, degree 2, over the V chord: it sounds unfinished, like a question. Bar 8 ends D, C, C, landing on do, the tonic: it sounds settled, like an answer. Two phrases built this way, a question and then an answer that starts the same but ends at home, make one of the most common shapes in all of music.

Key idea: A melody is built from small ideas, motifs, extended by repetition and sequence, shaped by steps and leaps, and organised into phrases that end in cadences.

Listening guide: Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, first movement

• The recording: the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Iván Fischer, the whole symphony on the orchestra's official YouTube channel. The first movement comes first and lasts about seven or eight minutes.
• The opening: the two knocks, each ending in a held note. Then the motif is passed quickly between the string sections, so fast that it becomes a running melody built entirely from short-short-short-long.
• The horn call: listen for a loud call from the horns, built from the same rhythm, which introduces a contrasting second theme. Wikipedia notes that this part of the movement moves to E flat major. The new tune is smooth and gentle, a contrast to the knocking. Listen underneath it: the short-short-short-long rhythm is still there, quietly, in the low strings.
• A surprise later on: when the opening music returns, the orchestra suddenly falls silent and a single oboe plays a short, slow, sad passage on its own. Then the storm starts again.
• Count the knocks: pick any 30 seconds and count how many times you hear the motif's rhythm, in any instrument. Most listeners lose count.

Common misconceptions

• "A melody has to be long and full of different notes." Beethoven's motif uses two different pitches and four notes. What makes a melody memorable is shape and rhythm as much as length.
• "Repeating something is lazy." Repetition is how listeners recognise and remember music. Composers vary it, with sequences and changes of instrument, so it stays fresh.
• "Beethoven said the opening is fate knocking at the door." That claim comes from Anton Schindler, whose stories about Beethoven historians treat with suspicion. Beethoven left no such title.
• "A cadence is just where the music stops." Some cadences sound like stopping and some like pausing to ask a question. Telling the two apart is how you hear a melody's structure.

What to remember

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, first heard in a freezing Vienna theatre on 22 December 1808, opens with a motif: three short notes and a long one, G, G, G, E flat, then F, F, F, D. A motif is a short idea that can be repeated and developed, and most of the first movement grows from this one. The second knock is a sequence, the same pattern starting a step lower, slightly adjusted to stay in the key. Melodies move by steps, to the next letter, and by leaps, which skip letters, and the shape they draw is the contour. A phrase is a musical sentence, and it ends with a cadence: inconclusive, ending on V like a question, or conclusive, going V to I like an answer, just as bars 4 and 8 of the Ode to Joy do. The "fate knocking at the door" story is doubtful, but the BBC really did use the motif's rhythm, Morse code for V, during the Second World War.

Sources

1. Peterson, J. (n.d.). Introduction to harmony, cadences, and phrase endings. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Fischer, I. (n.d.). Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 [Video]. Concertgebouworkest, YouTube. youtube.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Hughes, B., and Lavengood, M. (n.d.). Melody and phrasing. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub

In 1722 Johann Sebastian Bach finished a book of 24 preludes and fugues for keyboard, one in every major and every minor key. He called it Das Wohltemperirte Clavier, The Well-Tempered Clavier, and wrote on the title page that it was meant for young musicians eager to learn and for the enjoyment of players already skilled. Twenty years later he wrote a second book just like it.

The second piece in the first book is a fugue in C minor, and it lasts under two minutes. In 2015 the German-Japanese pianist Kimiko Ishizaka recorded the whole first book and, with the help of more than 900 people who paid for the project, released the recording into the public domain, free for anyone to use. Press play on that fugue and for the first few seconds you hear one line of music. Then a second line enters. Then a third. By the end, three tunes are running at once, and you can follow each one. How music layers its lines like this is called texture.

Four textures

Open Music Theory defines texture as how many voices, or lines, a piece has and how they interact. It names four main types. Here they are side by side, with an example of each from this course where possible:

Reading the table

Monophony is about lines, not people. A whole choir singing one tune together, or cellos and basses playing the same tune an octave apart, is still monophony. What counts is that there is only one melody and nothing underneath it.

Homophony has two common forms. Open Music Theory separates them. In a chorale style, all the voices move together in the same rhythm, in block chords, like a hymn. In melody and accompaniment, which may be the commonest texture in the world, one clear tune stands out and the other parts support it with a different rhythm: a singer with a guitar strumming chords, or the right hand and left hand of Für Elise.

Polyphony needs independence. In homophony the parts lean on the melody. In polyphony each part could almost stand on its own as a tune, and the parts move at different moments. When they sound together they make harmony, but you can choose to follow any one of them. Another word for polyphony is counterpoint, from an old Latin phrase meaning note against note.

Most music moves between textures. Open Music Theory stresses that pieces rarely keep one texture all the way through. A pop song might start with a solo voice, monophony, and then add the band, homophony.

Key idea: Texture is how many lines are sounding and how they relate: one line alone, one line decorated in several ways, one line with chords, or several independent lines at once.

How a fugue is built

A fugue is the most famous kind of polyphony. Open Music Theory uses exactly the piece in this lesson, Bach's Fugue in C minor, to explain how a fugue opens. The terms you need are these:

• The subject is the fugue's main tune, played first by one voice alone. In this fugue it is short and bouncy, about two bars long.
• The answer is the subject played by the next voice, starting on a different note, a fifth higher, so it sounds like the same tune in a new key.
• While the second voice plays the answer, the first voice keeps going with a new line that fits against it, called the countersubject.
• The exposition is the opening section, which ends once every voice has entered. In this fugue, Open Music Theory marks it as bars 1 to 8.
• Between entries, short passages called episodes or links take a small piece of the subject and repeat it in a sequence, as in Lesson 11.

This fugue has three voices. The subject enters first in the middle voice. The top voice answers. Then, after a short link, the bottom voice enters with the subject. From then on the subject keeps coming back in one voice or another, while the other voices weave around it.

Consonance and dissonance: why lines rub and settle

When independent lines move against each other, the notes that meet do not always blend. Open Music Theory explains that consonant combinations sound stable, as if they need not go anywhere, while dissonant ones sound unstable, as if they need to move on, or resolve. Two notes a third or a sixth apart, or an octave or a fifth apart, are treated as consonant. Two notes a step apart, a second, or one less than an octave, a seventh, are dissonant. The book adds that these categories have changed over history.

Try it with your voice and a friend, or with a keyboard. Play C and E together: smooth. Play C and D together: they rub and buzz. In a fugue, the lines keep creating little rubs and then moving to smooth combinations. That pull of tension and release is a big part of why counterpoint sounds alive rather than static.

Remember: Dissonance is not a mistake. It is tension that the music sets up on purpose and then releases.

Listening guide: Bach, Fugue in C minor, BWV 847

• The recording: Kimiko Ishizaka, piano, from the Open Well-Tempered Clavier (2015), released into the public domain and hosted on Wikimedia Commons. It lasts just under two minutes, so play it several times.
• First listen, the entries: the subject enters alone in the middle of the keyboard. Raise one finger when the second voice comes in above it, and a second finger when the third voice enters, low down, a little later.
• Second listen, follow one voice: listen only to the lowest line from the moment it enters. Hum along if you can. Notice that it does not simply play chords: it has its own tune.
• Third listen, count the subject: every time you hear the bouncy opening tune start again, in any voice, make a mark. It returns many times, sometimes in a major key.
• Compare textures: afterwards, play the first minute of Für Elise from Lesson 6. Hear how its tune leads and its left hand accompanies, where in the fugue every voice has an equal say.

Common misconceptions

• "More instruments means more polyphony." A huge orchestra all playing one tune together is still monophony. Texture depends on how many independent lines there are, not on how many players.
• "Homophony means everyone plays the same notes." The parts play different notes that form chords; what they share is that they follow and support one main melody.
• "Dissonance means the music is out of tune or wrong." Dissonance is a deliberate clash that creates tension. In Bach's counterpoint it is carefully placed and then resolved.
• "A fugue is a round." They are related, since both bring in voices one after another with the same tune. But in a round each voice repeats the whole tune exactly, while in a fugue the subject comes back in different keys and the voices go their own way in between.

What to carry forward

Texture describes how many lines are sounding and how they relate. Monophony is one melody alone, however many people play it; heterophony is several performers playing their own decorated versions of one tune at once, a feature Wikipedia notes in the gamelan music of Indonesia; homophony is one main melody supported by chords, either in block chords like a hymn or as melody and accompaniment like Für Elise; and polyphony, or counterpoint, is several independent melodies at once. A fugue is polyphony built from a subject that enters in each voice in turn, answered a fifth higher, with countersubjects and episodes along the way. Bach's Fugue in C minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722), recorded and given away by Kimiko Ishizaka, shows three voices entering one after another in its first eight bars. When lines meet they make consonances, which sound stable, and dissonances, which sound tense and want to resolve, and that pull gives counterpoint its energy.

Sources

1. Brady, S., and Hamm, C. (n.d.). Texture. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Gotham, M. (n.d.). High Baroque fugal exposition. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
3. Hamm, C., and Hughes, B. (n.d.). Intervals [Consonance and dissonance]. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
4. Ishizaka, K. (2015). Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Fugue No. 2 in C minor, BWV 847 [Audio recording, CC0 public domain dedication]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
5. Ishizaka, K. (n.d.). The Open Well-Tempered Clavier. welltemperedclavier.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Well-Tempered Clavier; Heterophony. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On 29 November 1946, British cinemas and classrooms got a new educational film called Instruments of the Orchestra. The London Symphony Orchestra played, conducted by Malcolm Sargent, and the music had been written for the film by the English composer Benjamin Britten. Britten built the whole piece from one short tune. It is a dance called a Rondeau by the English composer Henry Purcell, who had died 251 years earlier. Purcell wrote it for a play by Aphra Behn called Abdelazer.

Britten's idea was simple and brilliant. Play the tune with everyone, then take the orchestra apart, one instrument at a time, and finally put it back together again. The piece is called The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, and it is still the best tour of the orchestra ever written. In this lesson you will learn the method for taking any orchestra apart with your ears.

The four families

An orchestra has dozens of players but only four families of instruments. The family depends on how the instrument makes its sound, not on what it is made of. Here are the instruments Wikipedia lists in Britten's score, sorted by family:

Notice the surprises. The flute is usually made of metal but is a woodwind, because its sound comes from air split across an edge, not from buzzing lips. The harp sits with the strings. And some percussion instruments, like the timpani and xylophone, play real notes. Others, like the snare drum and cymbals, make sounds without a clear pitch.

The point: An instrument's family is decided by how it makes its sound: vibrating strings, vibrating air in a tube, buzzing lips, or something struck, shaken or scraped.

Size and pitch

Within each family, the bigger or longer instrument usually plays lower. A violin is small and high; a double bass is taller than most adults and low. A piccolo is about half the length of a flute and plays an octave higher. The Philharmonia Orchestra's online instrument guide gives the oboe's tube as 62 centimetres long and its range as roughly 233 to 1,600 vibrations per second. A longer string or a longer column of air vibrates more slowly, and slower vibrations sound lower.

Timbre: why a flute is not a violin

Play the same note, at the same loudness, on a flute and on a violin, and you can still tell them apart instantly. The quality that makes the difference is called timbre (say "TAM-ber"), or tone colour. Every instrument's sound is really a mixture of many frequencies stacked above the main note, and each instrument mixes them differently.

You can see this. Chrome Music Lab's Spectrogram experiment calls a spectrogram a picture of sound. It shows the frequencies in a sound, from low to high, and how they change over time. Its buttons let you compare a flute, a harp, a trombone and a voice side by side. The flute shows a few clean stripes; the trombone shows a tall stack of them.

The method: three questions

When an instrument plays a solo and you want to name it, ask three questions in order:

1. Which family? Is the sound bowed or plucked (strings), breathy or reedy (woodwinds), bright and buzzing (brass), or struck (percussion)?
2. High, middle or low? Within the family, the size rule narrows it down.
3. Any special features? A plucked string with a shimmering glide is likely a harp. A nasal, reedy high woodwind is likely an oboe; a smooth, round one is likely a clarinet.

Worked example: a solo that is reedy, low and a little comic. Family: woodwind, because it is reedy. Low: so not a flute or oboe. Comic, gruff tone: a bassoon. In Britten's piece the bassoons get a variation of their own, marked Allegro alla marcia, a lively march.

Who sits where, and the conductor

Seating varies from orchestra to orchestra. In many, the strings sit in a wide arc at the front and the woodwinds in the middle. The brass sit behind them, and the percussion at the back, where their loud sounds carry over everyone.

In front of them all stands the conductor. The conductor uses the patterns you learned in Lesson 3 to set the tempo and keep everyone together. The job is bigger than keeping time, though. The conductor also shapes the dynamics and the balance, deciding which line should be heard most at each moment.

Listening guide: Britten, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

The recording: the WDR Sinfonieorchester of Cologne, conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste. It is a video on the official YouTube channel of ARD Klassik, run by Germany's public broadcasters. It lasts about seventeen minutes, and because it is a video you can watch each instrument as it plays. Wikipedia's article on the piece gives this order:

Use the three questions on each variation before you check the table. Notice that within each family the variations go from high to low, and that the fugue reassembles the orchestra using the same polyphony you met in Lesson 12. Publisher Boosey and Hawkes also posts an official video of the piece with the score scrolling on screen, if you want to follow the notes.

Common misconceptions

• "Instruments made of metal are brass." The flute and the saxophone are metal but are woodwinds. The family depends on how the sound is made.
• "Percussion means drums." The family also includes the xylophone, triangle, cymbals, castanets and more, and some of them play tunes.
• "The conductor just waves in time." Keeping time is only part of the job. Conductors decide tempo, dynamics, balance and phrasing, and rehearse the players to get them.
• "Orchestral music is all old." Britten wrote this piece in 1946, and orchestras today play film scores, new works and music from every century.

The short version

The orchestra has four families, sorted by how instruments make sound. Strings are bowed or plucked. In woodwinds, air is split across an edge or set vibrating by a reed. Brass players buzz their lips into a mouthpiece. Percussion is struck, shaken or scraped. Within a family, bigger and longer usually means lower. Timbre, or tone colour, is what makes two instruments playing the same note sound different, and a spectrogram can show it as a picture. To identify an instrument, ask which family, how high or low, and what special features you hear. Britten wrote The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra for a 1946 film. It plays Purcell's tune with everyone and then with each family. Next it gives each instrument a variation, from piccolo to percussion. Finally it rebuilds the orchestra in a fugue that ends with Purcell's theme blazing in the brass.

Sources

1. WDR Sinfonieorchester and Saraste, J.-P. (n.d.). Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra [Video]. ARD Klassik, YouTube. youtube.com
2. Boosey and Hawkes. (n.d.). Benjamin Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (Official Score Video) [Video]. YouTube. youtube.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Philharmonia Orchestra. (n.d.). Oboe [Instrument guide]. philharmonia.co.uk
5. Google Creative Lab. (n.d.). Spectrogram. Chrome Music Lab. musiclab.chromeexperiments.com

In 1868 a trombone player in the United States Marine Band did something unusual to stop his thirteen-year-old son from running away. The boy, John Philip Sousa, had been talking about joining a circus band. So his father enlisted him in the Marine Band as an apprentice instead. Twelve years later, in 1880, Sousa came back to the band as its leader, and he led it for the next twelve years.

The Marine Band was already old by then. Congress created it on 11 July 1798, which makes it the oldest professional musical organisation in the United States. In 1801 President Thomas Jefferson asked it to play at his inauguration, and it has played at every presidential inauguration since. Jefferson gave it its nickname, "The President's Own". This lesson follows Sousa, his most famous march and the band he once led.

What makes a band a band

In Lesson 13 you met the orchestra's four families. A band is built mostly from just three of them: woodwinds, brass and percussion. The big difference is the missing bowed strings. Without violins and cellos, the woodwinds and brass take over their jobs: clarinets often carry the tunes that violins would play, and low brass like the tuba and euphonium hold up the bass.

Two instruments in that table have stories worth knowing. The saxophone was invented by the Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax, who patented it on 28 June 1846. It has a brass body but is a woodwind, because its sound comes from a single reed, like a clarinet. The sousaphone is a tuba that wraps around the player's body, with its huge bell above the head, so it can be carried on a march. It was developed around 1893 by the instrument maker J. W. Pepper together with Sousa, which is how it got his name.

Remember: A band uses woodwinds, brass and percussion; the bowed strings are what it leaves out. Its instruments are chosen to be loud enough for outdoors and, for a marching band, light enough to carry.

The march that became the National March

In 1892 Sousa left the Marine Band and started his own touring band. Four years later, he and his wife were sailing home from a holiday in Europe on the ship Teutonic when he learned that his band's manager, David Blakely, had died. In his 1928 autobiography Sousa wrote that he composed a new march in his head on that voyage, on Christmas Day 1896. He wrote it down when he reached America. It was The Stars and Stripes Forever. It was first performed at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia on 14 May 1897, and audiences loved it at once. In 1987 an Act of Congress made it the official National March of the United States.

How a march is built

Like the Maple Leaf Rag in Lesson 4, a march is made of sections called strains, each usually repeated. Wikipedia's article describes the form of The Stars and Stripes Forever in the traditional military style:

Two terms from that table are worth learning. An obbligato is an important added line that decorates the main tune; here it is the famous piccolo part, high and fast. A countermelody is a second tune that plays at the same time as the main one and fits against it; here the trombones play it. The last section is polyphony, the texture from Lesson 12: three different tunes at once, each easy to follow.

Sousa told the press what those three tunes meant to him. The broad main theme stood for the North, the piccolo obbligato for the South and the trombones' countermelody for the West. When all three come together at the climax, he said, they represent the Union itself.

Bands everywhere

Bands come in many forms. A concert band, or wind band, sits and plays in a hall. A marching band plays while moving in patterns on a field or along a street. Some marching bands aim for perfect precision. Show-style bands aim to entertain, often adding dance lines and majorettes. Southern University's band, the Human Jukebox, is a famous show band at a historically Black university, and Wikipedia notes that many fans of these bands call marching band a sport. Jazz big bands, which you will meet in the jazz lesson, put saxophones, trumpets and trombones together with a rhythm section of piano, bass and drums.

Listening guide: Sousa, The Stars and Stripes Forever

• The recording: the United States Marine Band, Sousa's own old band, conducted by Jason K. Fettig, from its 2017 recording of Sousa's complete marches. It is a public-domain recording on Wikimedia Commons and lasts about three and a half minutes. As a work of the US government, it is free for anyone to use.
• March along: the march is in two big beats per bar. Step left, right in place from the start.
• Find the trio: listen for the moment the music becomes broader and smoother, after the first two strains. That is the trio.
• The breakstrain: a sudden storm, with the low brass charging and the high instruments answering.
• The piccolo: when the trio returns, the tiny piccolo plays its famous fast line above the band. In the grandioso at the end, listen for three layers: the trio tune in the middle, the piccolo on top and the trombones' bold countermelody underneath.

Common misconceptions

• "Band means rock band." In music education a band usually means a concert or marching band of woodwinds, brass and percussion. Rock bands are a different tradition, which you will meet later.
• "The saxophone is a brass instrument." It is made of brass but sounds with a reed, so it is a woodwind.
• "Marches are simple music." A Sousa march fits several strains, key changes and up to three tunes at once into about three minutes, and its players need serious skill to play it cleanly at marching speed.
• "Military bands only play military music." The Marine Band includes a full chamber orchestra, and its recordings range from marches to waltzes, like the Blue Danube you heard in Lesson 3.

Putting it together

A band is built from woodwinds, brass and percussion, without the orchestra's bowed strings. Concert bands sit and play. Marching bands perform on the move, from military parades to the show bands of historically Black colleges and universities. The saxophone, patented by Adolphe Sax in 1846, is a brass-bodied woodwind, and the sousaphone, developed around 1893 by J. W. Pepper with Sousa, is a tuba you can march with. The United States Marine Band, founded in 1798 and called The President's Own, has played at every inauguration since Jefferson's in 1801. Sousa joined it at thirteen, led it from 1880 to 1892, and in 1896 composed The Stars and Stripes Forever, the National March since 1987. Its form runs through strains, a trio and a breakstrain to a grandioso where the tune, the piccolo obbligato and the trombone countermelody sound together.

Sources

1. United States Marine Band and Fettig, J. K. (2017). The Stars and Stripes Forever, from The Complete Marches of John Philip Sousa, Vol. 3 [Audio recording, public domain]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Stars and Stripes Forever. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). John Philip Sousa; United States Marine Band. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Saxophone; Sousaphone; Marching band. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Sousa, J. P. (1928). Marching along: Recollections of men, women and music. Hale, Cushman and Flint.

Try this before you read on. Rest two fingertips lightly on the front of your neck and hum any note. You will feel a buzz. Hum higher, then lower, then say "ah" out loud: the buzz is still there. Now whisper "ah", just once. The buzz is gone.

That is a puzzle. A violin has strings, a trumpet has a brass tube and a drum has a skin. You have none of those, yet your voice can make hundreds of notes, from a growl to a squeak. Many people your age notice a second puzzle, too. A voice that sang the high part easily last year may now crack, wobble or drop without warning. This lesson solves both puzzles. It shows how the voice works, how singers are sorted into voice types, and what is going on when a voice changes.

Three parts: power, buzz and shape

Every wind instrument needs three things: a power source, something that vibrates, and something that shapes the sound. Your voice has all three, packed into your chest, neck and head.

The larynx, or voice box, sits in your neck between the base of your tongue and the top of your windpipe. Inside it are the vocal folds, often called vocal cords. They are two bands of smooth muscle tissue that face each other. When you breathe, they stay open so air can pass. When you speak or sing, your brain brings them together. Air from your lungs blows past them and makes them vibrate (NIDCD). They open and shut so fast that, as Wikipedia's article on the vocal folds puts it, they chop a steady flow of air into little puffs. Those puffs reach your ears as sound waves.

That explains the whisper test. When you whisper, the folds are held apart, so they do not vibrate. You hear only the hiss of rushing air, with no buzz and no clear pitch. Keep whispering to a minimum, though: NIDCD lists whispering, like screaming, among the extremes that can stress your voice.

How the folds make a note

Pitch, how high or low a note sounds, depends on how fast something vibrates. You met this rule in Lesson 13: the long, heavy strings of a double bass vibrate slowly and sound low, and the short piccolo sounds high. Vocal folds follow the same rule. How fast they vibrate depends on their length, their size and their tension, which means how tightly they are stretched. Small muscles in the larynx adjust the length and tension to fine-tune each note. Folds stretched tighter vibrate faster and sound higher. When you slide your hum from low to high, those muscles are doing the work.

How fast is fast? Scientists count vibrations per second in a unit called the hertz (Hz). Wikipedia gives these averages for the basic pitch of the voice: about 125 Hz for adult men, about 210 Hz for adult women and over 300 Hz for children. So a child's vocal folds open and close more than 300 times every second.

Size explains the differences. Adult male voices are usually lower because men's vocal folds are usually longer and thicker. Children's folds are much shorter than any adult's. Before puberty, girls and boys have about the same range and tone, because their voice boxes are a similar size.

Shaping the sound

The buzz from the folds is only the start. The sound then travels up through your throat, mouth and nose. These act as resonating cavities: hollow spaces that shape the sound and make some parts of it stronger, a process called resonance (NIDCD). A 2021 research review by Virginia Zamponi and colleagues sums it up: the vocal tract shapes the sound from the folds and boosts parts of it, which gives each person a unique tone colour. Then your tongue, the roof of your mouth, your cheeks and your lips shape that sound into words.

You can hear resonance at work. Sing one comfortable note on "ee", then change to "oo" and then "ah" without changing the note. The pitch stays the same, because your folds are vibrating at the same speed. What changes is the shape of the spaces above them, so the tone colour changes. That is timbre, which you met with the instruments in Lesson 13. NIDCD explains that a voice's pitch, volume and tone depend on the size and shape of the folds and of the resonating spaces, which is why everyone's voice sounds different.

Why this matters: your voice is a real wind instrument, with a power source (breath), a vibrator (the vocal folds) and resonators (the throat, mouth and nose). Pitch comes from how fast the folds vibrate. Tone colour comes from the folds together with the shape of the spaces above them. Every tip for singing well, and for keeping your voice healthy, looks after one of those three parts.

Sorting voices: range and comfort zone

Your range is every note you can sing, from lowest to highest. Your tessitura (say tess-ih-TOOR-ah) is the part of your range where your voice feels comfortable most of the time. Choirs sort singers into parts mainly by range, while solo singers are sorted into voice types more by tessitura.

To compare ranges, musicians add an octave number to each note name. Middle C is C4. The next C up the keyboard is C5, and the C below middle C is C3. The number changes at every C, so the A just below middle C is A3. Here are typical ranges from Wikipedia's article on voice types. Many singers reach a little higher or lower.

Most choirs use just four parts, known by their first letters: SATB, for soprano, alto, tenor and bass. Soprano and alto are the higher parts, and tenor and bass are the lower ones. Children's choirs may sing treble parts. Wikipedia notes that most people have medium voices, so many choir singers are given a part that sits a little too high or too low for them. If a part feels like a strain, tell your choir leader.

The changing voice

During puberty, hormones make the larynx grow in everyone. The growth is much bigger in boys, whose vocal folds become much longer and thicker. Zamponi and colleagues give the average results from the research. Voices change at a mean age of about 12, though many people start earlier or later. The basic pitch drops by about one octave in boys and by about three or four half steps in girls, and the range moves down with it. A half step, from Lesson 6, is the distance between two neighbouring keys on a keyboard.

The review describes three stages:

1. Before the change: the voice can sound flat, and now and then hoarse or breathy.
2. The change itself: notes are hard to pitch accurately, the pitch can jump suddenly, and the voice may flip into falsetto, a light, high register above the normal voice.
3. After the change: the voice slowly settles into its adult tone colour and range.

That sudden flip is a voice crack: for a moment, the voice jumps by accident into a higher register, usually falsetto. Cracks can also come from singing or talking outside your natural range, from stress or from tiredness. When they come from puberty, each one lasts only a moment, and they happen less often as the voice grows up. Adult pitch usually arrives two or three years after the change begins, but the voice keeps maturing into the early twenties (Wikipedia, Voice change). So nobody's voice type is settled at thirteen.

What does this mean for singing? Sing where your voice is comfortable now, and expect that place to move. Someone whose voice has dropped can sing a tune an octave lower, or sing high notes lightly in falsetto. Nothing is wrong with a voice that is changing. It is growing, like the rest of you.

Looking after your voice

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the US National Institutes of Health, recommends simple habits for a healthy voice:

• Drink plenty of water, especially when you exercise.
• Take vocal naps: rest your voice at times during the day.
• Avoid the extremes, such as screaming or whispering. Talking too loudly and too softly can both stress your voice.
• Rest your voice when you are sick, and avoid speaking or singing when your voice is hoarse or tired.
• Support your voice with deep breaths, rather than pushing from your throat alone.
• Stay away from smoke, including other people's.

Some of NIDCD's warning signs, such as losing high notes or a voice that suddenly sounds deeper, are also a normal part of growing up. Others are not. If your voice stays hoarse or raspy, your throat often feels raw or strained, or talking has become an effort, tell a parent or carer. NIDCD advises seeing a doctor to find the cause of a voice problem.

Listening guide: Marian Anderson and the Fisk Jubilee Quartet

Both recordings below are public domain. The Library of Congress made the digital copies, and both are on Wikimedia Commons. Both are spirituals: religious songs created by African Americans, which blended African musical traditions with Christian hymns and grew out of the experience of slavery.

• Recording 1: Marian Anderson, contralto, sings the spiritual My Way's Cloudy in an arrangement by H. T. Burleigh, with an orchestra conducted by Rosario Bourdon. Victor recorded it on 10 December 1923. It lasts 2:51.
• The singer: Anderson was born in Philadelphia in 1897 and joined her church's junior choir at six. 1923 was the year of her first records. Burleigh, a Black composer and baritone, had already helped make spirituals popular concert songs with his arrangements. In 1935 the conductor Arturo Toscanini told Anderson she had a voice "heard once in a hundred years". In 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. With support from Eleanor Roosevelt and others, she sang outdoors on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead, on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1939. More than 75,000 people came, and millions more listened on the radio. In 1955 she became the first Black American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera.
• Listen for: the dark, rich colour of a contralto voice. Does she keep long notes at one loudness, or swell and fade them (Lesson 7)? Where does she breathe? Can you follow the words? It is a century-old record, so expect some hiss.
• Recording 2: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, recorded for Victor in 1909 by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet, four singers from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. John Wesley Work II sang first tenor. It lasts 3:00, and in 2002 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.
• The song and the singers: the spiritual was probably composed in the late 1860s by Wallace Willis and his daughter Minerva Willis. They were Choctaw Freedmen: formerly enslaved people who were freed, and made citizens of the Choctaw Nation, after the Civil War. Fisk's first Jubilee Singers, nine students, set off on tour in 1871 to raise money for their struggling five-year-old university. They sang as sopranos, contraltos, tenors and basses, the four parts of a modern SATB choir. Their tours took spirituals to audiences across the United States and Europe, and in 1873 they sang for Queen Victoria.
• Listen for: how many voice parts can you hear, and which one carries the tune? Do the other singers move together in chords (homophony, Lesson 12)? Wikipedia notes that the melody is pentatonic, built on the five-note scale from Lesson 9.

Common misconceptions

• "Vocal cords are like guitar strings." They are folds of muscle and tissue, not strings. Nobody plucks them: they vibrate when air blows past.
• "Your voice comes from your throat alone." Your lungs supply the power, and your mouth and nose shape the sound. NIDCD advises supporting the voice with deep breaths instead of relying on the throat.
• "Only boys' voices change." Everyone's larynx grows at puberty. Girls' voices drop less, by three or four half steps on average, but they change too.
• "A voice crack means you can't sing." Cracks are a normal part of a changing voice. They come and go, and they fade as the voice matures.
• "Your voice type is fixed by the time you are a teenager." The voice keeps maturing into the early twenties, so your voice type may still change.

What you now know

Your voice works like a wind instrument. Breath from your lungs is the power. Two vocal folds in your larynx vibrate as air blows past, chopping it into puffs of sound, and when you whisper they stay apart. Your throat, mouth and nose resonate, shaping the buzz into your own tone colour, and your tongue and lips shape it into words. Pitch depends on how fast the folds vibrate, which is set by their length, size and tension. Longer, thicker folds sound lower, which is why adult men usually sound lowest. Singers are sorted by range and tessitura into soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, countertenor, tenor, baritone and bass, and most choirs sing in four parts, SATB. At puberty, around age 12 on average, the larynx grows. The basic pitch drops about an octave in boys and three or four half steps in girls, with cracks along the way that fade as the voice settles. Water, rest, no screaming and steady breathing keep a voice healthy. Marian Anderson's contralto and the Fisk Jubilee Quartet's 1909 spiritual show what trained voices can do, and how singers have changed history.

Sources

1. Anderson, M., Burleigh, H. T. (arranger) and Bourdon, R. (conductor). (1923). My Way's Cloudy [Audio recording, Victor, public domain]. Library of Congress National Jukebox, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
2. Fisk University Jubilee Quartet. (1909). Swing Low, Sweet Chariot [Audio recording, Victor, public domain]. Library of Congress National Jukebox, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
3. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. (n.d.). Taking care of your voice. National Institutes of Health. nidcd.nih.gov
4. Zamponi, V., Mazzilli, R., Mazzilli, F. and Fantini, M. (2021). Effect of sex hormones on human voice physiology: From childhood to senescence. Hormones, 20(4), 691-696. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Voice type; Voice change; Vocal cords; Human voice; Whispering. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Marian Anderson; Harry Burleigh; Fisk Jubilee Singers; Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
7. Google Creative Lab. (n.d.). Spectrogram. Chrome Music Lab. musiclab.chromeexperiments.com

A student was asked to map the form of three famous songs, naming every section in order from the first note to the last. Here is what they handed in.

Every chart has at least one bug, and they are bugs almost everyone makes at first. The student assumed that every song is built from verses and choruses. Many songs are not. By the end of this lesson you will have three song forms in your toolkit, a checklist for telling them apart, and fixed versions of all three charts. The analyses come from Open Music Theory, a free online textbook by a team of music theory teachers.

Form, sections and letters

The form of a piece is its plan: the order of its sections, and which ones come back. A section is a chunk of music with one job, such as a verse or a chorus. Musicians label sections with capital letters. The first main section is A. Music that returns gets the same letter again, and new, contrasting music gets the next letter, B. Lesson 17 uses the same letters for long classical pieces.

Two clues help you tell sections apart. The first is the music: is this the same tune and chords as before, or something new? The second is the words, or lyrics. Open Music Theory calls a section lyric-variant if its words change each time it returns, and lyric-invariant if its words stay the same.

Some sections matter more than others. Core sections carry the main music and words. Other sections frame them. An intro leads from silence into the song, an outro winds the song down, often with a fade-out, and a short interlude links two sections. An ending that brings brand-new music is called a coda.

Bug 1: School Day has no chorus

School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell) was written and recorded by Chuck Berry, a Black American singer, guitarist and songwriter from St. Louis, Missouri. He recorded it in Chicago on 21 January 1957, with Johnnie Johnson on piano, Hubert Sumlin on guitar, Willie Dixon on bass and Fred Below on drums. Chess Records released it in March 1957. It reached number 3 on Billboard's pop chart and number 1 on its R&B chart. As the title suggests, its words are about a day at school.

Open Music Theory uses this song as its model of strophic form. A strophe is a complete unit of several phrases that sets one stanza of words. A strophic song repeats the same strophe music again and again, with new words each time, so its form is written AAA. In School Day, each new section brings the same, or nearly the same, melody, chords and phrase plan, while the words move on. Even the two instrumental sections are strophes. In each one the guitar plays a new melody over the same underlying pattern.

So the bug is the word chorus. There is no section in School Day whose music is different from the others, so there is nothing to be a chorus. Many strophic songs do have a line that comes back at the same spot in every strophe, usually with the title in it. That line is a refrain: a short passage, a phrase or less, whose words stay the same inside a section whose other words change. A refrain lives inside a section. A chorus is a whole section of its own. Open Music Theory notes that people often use the two words as if they meant the same thing, and asks musicians to keep them apart.

Open Music Theory adds that strophic form is most common in blues, early hip hop and early rock and roll. You will meet all three in Module 8.

Bug 2: I Want to Hold Your Hand has a bridge, not a chorus

John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote I Want to Hold Your Hand side by side at a piano in a basement music room in London. The Beatles recorded it on 17 October 1963. On 1 February 1964 it reached number one in the United States, their first American number one, and it stayed there for seven weeks. Wikipedia credits it with starting the British Invasion, when British bands flooded the American charts. It is in G major.

Open Music Theory uses it to show AABA form, also called 32-bar song form, because in older songs of this kind each of the four sections was eight bars long. After a short intro come two strophes: A, A. Then, at about 0:52, the music turns to a contrasting section, the bridge (B). The bridge builds tension by holding back the main tune. Bridges like this tend to use chords other than the home chord, and they commonly end on the dominant chord, V, from Lesson 10, which pulls back toward home. At about 1:11 the strophe returns: A. Then the song repeats the bridge and the strophe once more, so the whole plan runs intro, A, A, B, A, B, A.

The student heard something new at 0:52 and called it a chorus. But the song begins and ends with A, and the title words sit in the A sections, so A is the main section. B is there to contrast with A and to lead back to it. That is the job of a bridge.

Bug 3: Livin' on a Prayer has a prechorus and a bridge

Livin' on a Prayer was written by Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and Desmond Child, and released in October 1986 by Bon Jovi, a band formed in Sayreville, New Jersey. In 1987 it spent four weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Its words tell the story of a young working couple struggling to make ends meet. Sambora played the main guitar riff through a talk box, a device that sends the guitar's sound through a plastic tube into the player's mouth. Changing the mouth's shape then shapes the guitar's sound the way it shapes a voice, as you saw in Lesson 15, so the guitar seems to talk.

This song is in verse-chorus form, which Open Music Theory calls the most common form of pop songs today. It took over rock and roll in the 1960s. In verse-chorus form the work is split between two core sections. The verse is lyric-variant: it brings new words each time, which move the story on. The chorus is lyric-invariant: it brings the same words each time, usually including the title. It also sounds more intense than the verse, with a thicker texture, backing vocals or a higher melody. Other sections can join them. A prechorus builds energy between verse and chorus. A short postchorus rounds off a chorus. A bridge in a verse-chorus song usually appears once, near the end, in place of a verse.

A verse, prechorus and chorus that run in that order make up a cycle. Here is Open Music Theory's map of the song, timed on the album recording. A video may run a second or two differently.

The student missed the prechorus completely, hearing it as part of the verse. They also labelled the solo by its instrument instead of its job: here the guitar solo is the bridge. One more thing to listen for: Wikipedia notes that the song is in E minor and moves to G minor for the final chorus. That is three half steps higher, a key change you can feel as a lift.

In short: strophic songs repeat one section, AAA. AABA songs add a contrasting bridge that leads back to the main strophe. Verse-chorus songs split the work between verses that tell the story and a chorus that repeats the title, often with a prechorus to build energy and a bridge near the end. A chorus is a whole section; a refrain is a line inside a section.

The fixed charts

A debugging checklist

1. Listen to the whole song once without writing anything. Notice where something clearly new starts.
2. For each section, ask whether the music is new or has been heard before. Same music gets the same letter.
3. Ask whether the words change each time (a verse or a strophe) or stay the same (a chorus).
4. If a short line repeats inside a section, call it a refrain, not a chorus.
5. If a section builds energy just before the chorus, it is a prechorus.
6. If a contrasting section leads back to the main one, it is a bridge.
7. Label the frame last: intro, interludes, and outro or coda.

Listening guide

• School Day: Chuck Berry's 1957 recording, posted by his record label on YouTube. Raise a finger each time a new strophe starts, and notice that the guitar-solo strophes have the same length and pattern as the sung ones.
• I Want to Hold Your Hand: the Beatles' 1963 recording, posted by their label. Listen for the handclaps, which all four Beatles played, and for Lennon and McCartney singing sometimes in unison, on the same notes, and sometimes in harmony. Hear how the bridge holds back the main tune before the A section returns.
• Livin' on a Prayer: Bon Jovi's official music video. Listen for the talking sound of the talk box, the energy rising in each prechorus, and the lift of the key change near the end.

Common misconceptions

• "Every song has verses and a chorus." Strophic and AABA songs are built from strophes, and many have no chorus section at all.
• "Chorus and refrain mean the same thing." A chorus is a whole section with the same words each time. A refrain is a line or less inside a section.
• "A guitar solo is just a break." A solo can be a full strophe, as in School Day, or work as a bridge, as in Livin' on a Prayer. Label each section by its job, not its instrument.
• "The bridge is any part that sounds different." A bridge contrasts with the main section and leads back to it. A brand-new ending is a coda, and a short link between sections is an interlude.

Recap

A song's form is the order of its sections and which ones return, labelled with letters. Two clues tell sections apart: whether the music is new, and whether the words change. Strophic form (AAA) repeats one strophe, as in Chuck Berry's School Day, recorded in Chicago in 1957, where even the guitar solos follow the strophe pattern. A refrain is a repeated line inside a section, not a chorus. AABA, or 32-bar song form, adds a contrasting bridge that builds tension and leads back to the main strophe, as in the Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand, their first American number one in 1964. Verse-chorus form, the most common pop form today, splits the work between story-telling verses and a repeated chorus, with a prechorus to build energy and often a bridge near the end, as in Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer. Intros, interludes, outros and codas frame the core sections.

Sources

1. Hughes, B. and Lavengood, M. (n.d.). AABA form and strophic form. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). viva.pressbooks.pub
2. Hughes, B. and Lavengood, M. (n.d.). Verse-chorus form. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). viva.pressbooks.pub
3. Berry, C. (1957). School Day (Ring Ring Goes the Bell) [Audio recording, Chess]. Chuck Berry - Topic, YouTube. youtube.com
4. The Beatles. (1963). I Want to Hold Your Hand (Remastered 2015) [Audio recording]. The Beatles - Topic, YouTube. youtube.com
5. Bon Jovi. (1986). Livin' on a Prayer [Official music video]. BonJoviVEVO, YouTube. youtube.com
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). School Days (Chuck Berry song); I Want to Hold Your Hand; Livin' on a Prayer; Talk box. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A pop song, as you saw in Lesson 16, lasts three or four minutes. Mozart's twelve variations on a French nursery tune last about twelve. A performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony usually lasts between 30 and 40 minutes. How do you keep your bearings in a piece that long, with no words to help? You use the tool you used for songs: letters for sections. This lesson gives you a step-by-step procedure for mapping a long piece. Then you will try it on three long forms, theme and variations, rondo and sonata form, and finish with the four-movement plan of a symphony.

The procedure: mapping a long piece

1. Find the main idea. Listen to the first minute and hum the main tune back. Call it A.
2. Listen for changes. Each time the music changes, ask one question: is this A again, A changed, or something new?
3. Label what you hear. A section that returns gets the same letter. A changed version gets a number: A1, A2 and so on. (Some books write A prime instead, with a small mark after the letter.) New music gets the next letter, B, then C.
4. Track the key. Does it sound major or minor (Lesson 9)? Does it feel at home, or as if it has travelled away?
5. Note the big changes: a new tempo, a new meter, or a pause where one movement ends and the next begins.
6. Draw the map: a row of letters, with a short note under each one.

Form 1: theme and variations

In theme and variations, a tune called the theme is played first, then repeated again and again, changed each time. Each changed version is a variation. Wikipedia's article on variation lists what can change: the melody, the rhythm, the harmony, the counterpoint, the timbre, the instruments, or any mix of these. It adds that in pieces from the 1700s and earlier, each variation usually keeps the same length and structure as the theme. So the map is simple: A, A1, A2, A3 and so on.

Mozart wrote his Twelve Variations on "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman" for solo piano when he was about 25, in 1781 or 1782, and they were first printed in Vienna in 1785. The theme is a French folk song that first appeared in 1761. You know it already: the same melody is used for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and the Alphabet Song. The theme has three parts, A, B and A again, each eight bars long. It is in 2/4 time and in C major.

Wikipedia gives enough detail to start a map of the twelve variations. Every variation is in 2/4 except the last, which is in 3/4. Every one is in C major except Variation 8, which is in C minor. Only the last two have tempo markings. And however much Mozart decorates the tune, it stays recognisable all the way through.

The other six variations change the music too. Working out how is your job in the activity.

Form 2: rondo

In a rondo, a main section keeps coming back, with contrasting sections in between. Open Music Theory calls the returning main section A, or the refrain, and the contrasting sections episodes, labelled B, C and so on. Be careful: this is a different use of the word refrain from the one in Lesson 16, where it meant a repeated line inside a song section. In a rondo, the refrain is always in the home key. The episodes usually contrast with it in key, and in tune too. The commonest plans are ABACA, a five-part rondo, and ABACABA, a seven-part rondo.

You have already heard a rondo. Wikipedia describes Beethoven's Für Elise, from Lesson 6, as a five-part rondo, ABACA. Its refrain is in A minor. The B episode moves to F major. The C episode stays in A minor but brings new, darker music over a low note held in the bass. Each time, the refrain comes back home.

The upshot: long pieces are built from the same few moves as songs. Say something (A), change it (A1, A2) or contrast it (B, C), and bring it back. Letters let you see a twelve-minute piece on a single line.

Form 3: sonata form

Sonata form was the standard plan for the first movement of a symphony in the time of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Wikipedia's article on the Fifth Symphony calls it the standard form for first movements that Beethoven inherited from Haydn and Mozart. Sonata form is less a row of letters than a story in three parts. Open Music Theory describes it like this:

An introduction can also come before the exposition. Beethoven's Fifth has none: it opens straight away with the four-note motif you met in Lesson 11, and its first movement is in sonata form. Wikipedia describes the plan. An exposition sets up a second key, E-flat major. A development cuts up and reworks the material. A recapitulation brings the themes back mostly in the home key of C, and a massive coda ends the movement. Almost every theme grows out of that one four-note motif.

The symphony: one big piece in movements

A symphony is a long piece for orchestra in several separate parts called movements, often three or four, with the first usually in sonata form (Wikipedia). Each movement has its own tempo and character. In the Classical period the four-movement plan settled into this pattern: a fast opening movement, often in sonata form; a slow movement; a minuet or scherzo with a contrasting middle section called a trio; and a fast finale, often a rondo or in sonata form.

Beethoven's Fifth follows that plan. Here it is, with Wikipedia's typical timings:

The symphony tells a story in keys. It starts in stormy C minor and ends in bright C major. Two moments near the end are worth waiting for. At the end of the third movement, the scherzo comes back very quietly, with the strings plucking pizzicato. Then the timpani tap quiet repeated notes, the music swells in a huge crescendo, and the finale bursts in with no pause at all. At that moment, five players who have sat silent through the whole symphony join in: three trombones, a contrabassoon and a piccolo. Wikipedia notes that this finale was the first time the piccolo and the contrabassoon were used in a symphony.

The Fifth was first performed on 22 December 1808 at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, with Beethoven directing. It was part of one enormous concert of his new works that lasted more than four hours.

Listening guide

• Mozart: the pianist Simone Renzi plays the Twelve Variations on "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman" in a 2010 recording on Wikimedia Commons, shared under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 3.0). It lasts about 12 minutes. Because each variation follows the theme's shape, you can feel one end before the next begins. Listen for the darker sound of Variation 8, the slow Variation 11 and the fast, three-beat Variation 12.
• Beethoven: the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Iván Fischer, plays the whole symphony on the orchestra's official YouTube channel. Listen for the breaks between movements, and for the place where there is none: the third movement runs straight into the fourth. In the third movement, listen for the short-short-short-long rhythm of the opening motif coming back. Wikipedia quotes a writer who says it gradually takes command of the whole movement.
• Für Elise again: to hear a rondo, replay Alice Sara Ott's recording from Lesson 6, on Deutsche Grammophon's official channel, and map it: A, B, A, C, A.

Common misconceptions

• "A symphony is any piece played by an orchestra." A symphony is a particular kind of long orchestral piece, usually in three or four movements with the first in sonata form. Overtures and film scores are orchestral too, but they are not symphonies.
• "A variation is a new tune." A variation changes how the theme is presented, but the theme stays recognisable underneath. A brand-new tune would be a new section, B.
• "Sonata form means a piece called a sonata." Sonata form is a plan for a single movement, and it is used in symphonies, like the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth, as well as in sonatas.
• "The recapitulation is an exact repeat of the exposition." The themes return, but now the secondary theme stays in the home key, so the music has to take a different route to get there.

Where this leaves us

Long pieces can be mapped with the same tool as songs. Find the main idea, label returns, changes and contrasts with letters, track the key, and note the big changes. Theme and variations (A, A1, A2 and so on) repeats a theme, changing it each time. In Mozart's twelve variations on Ah vous dirai-je, Maman, the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, the changes include decoration, syncopation, new chords, a switch to C minor in Variation 8, a slow Variation 11 and a fast Variation 12 in 3/4. A rondo brings back a main section between contrasting episodes, as in Für Elise, ABACA. Sonata form tells a story in three parts: an exposition that leaves home for a new key, a development that travels, and a recapitulation that brings everything home. A symphony puts several movements together. Beethoven's Fifth, first heard in Vienna in 1808, runs from a sonata-form first movement in C minor, through slow double variations and a scherzo, straight into a C-major finale where trombones, contrabassoon and piccolo join in.

Sources

1. Renzi, S. (2010). Mozart: 12 Variations on "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman", K. 265 [Audio recording, CC BY 3.0]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
2. Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Fischer, I. (n.d.). Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 [Video]. Concertgebouworkest, YouTube. youtube.com
3. Jarvis, B. (n.d.). Sonata form. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). viva.pressbooks.pub
4. Jarvis, B. (n.d.). Rondo. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). viva.pressbooks.pub
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Twelve Variations on "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman"; Variation (music). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven); Symphony; Für Elise. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Picture two scenes from West Africa. In the Volta Region of eastern Ghana, a crowd dances at a funeral. An iron bell rings the same short phrase again and again, rattles hiss, drums of different sizes play interlocking parts, and singers answer a leader's call. Far to the north-west, in Mali, one musician sits with a 21-string harp built from half a gourd. With only the fingers of two hands, he plays a repeating pattern and a stream of fast, flashing runs at the same time.

Both scenes are West African music, and they are almost opposites: a whole community making music together, and one master musician with one instrument. West Africa is a huge region of many peoples, languages and musical traditions, and no single sound stands for all of it. This lesson compares two traditions closely: the dance-drumming of the Ewe people and the kora music of the Mande jali.

Who and where

Ewe dance-drumming: everyone has a job

An Ewe drumming ensemble has several drums, a bell and a rattle, and usually a master drum that leads (Wikipedia, Ewe drumming). Each player has a particular job:

Everything is organised by the bell. Its repeating phrase is called a timeline, because it marks out time for everyone else. The music scholar David Locke writes that the bell phrase guides the tempo, lines up the instruments and divides the music into cycles. Wikipedia adds that the bell player must be someone trustworthy, who plays steadily and without mistakes. The whole ensemble depends on that part.

The most common bell part is called the standard pattern. Locke explains that it is so widespread in this part of West Africa that scholars gave it that name. It has seven strokes spread across a cycle of twelve quick pulses, spaced 2 + 2 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 1. The twelve pulses group into four main beats of three pulses each, like the 12/8 meter you met in Lesson 3. Count the pulses out loud and strike the bell on each X:

Look at the bell against the four main beats. Only two of its seven strokes, on pulses 1 and 10, land on a main beat. The rest fall in between, so the bell seems to pull against the beat, the way syncopation did in Lesson 4. Locke writes that cross-rhythm runs all through Ewe drumming. A cross-rhythm is two or more contrasting rhythms played at the same time within the same meter. The most basic one in Ewe music is three against two, which you will try in the activity.

The drums can also talk. Ewe is a tonal language: the pitch at which a word is spoken changes its meaning. By striking a drum in different ways to make higher and lower sounds, a lead drummer can imitate the tones of spoken phrases. In Agbadza, Wikipedia notes, the lead drum uses this drum language to tell the dancers when to start.

Agbadza

Agbadza is the most famous and widely played Ewe dance, according to Wikipedia. It grew out of a war dance called Atrikpui, which was used to train warriors and give them courage. During a period of peace around the 1920s, the Ewe began to use the old songs for enjoyment instead, and Atrikpui became Agbadza. Today it is played at funerals, weddings and parties, and at the Hogbetsotso Festival of the Anlo Ewe. Unlike some Ewe dances that are reserved for certain people, everyone is welcome to join in. Because of the dancers' bird-like movements, it is sometimes called the chicken dance.

Worth holding on to: in Ewe dance-drumming, no single part is the music. The bell's timeline holds everything together. Each instrument has its own job. The music lives in how the parts fit together and answer each other, and the singers and dancers are part of the ensemble too.

The kora and the jali

The kora is a West African string instrument with features of both a harp and a lute. Its body is a large gourd, cut in half and covered with cow skin, with a long hardwood neck. Its 21 strings run in two rows over a tall, notched bridge: eleven are played by the left hand and ten by the right. The strings were once thin strips of cow or antelope hide; today most are nylon fishing line or harp strings. Leather rings on the neck, called konso, let the player retune the kora to one of four seven-note scales. Wikipedia says they are close to the Western major and minor scales and to the Lydian mode. The Lydian mode is a major scale with its fourth note raised by a half step.

The player holds the kora upright and plucks with both hands, while some fingers grip two handles that run along the sides. Skilled players do two things at once. They repeat an ostinato riff, called kumbengo, and over it they play improvised runs, called birimintingo. So a single kora can fill the music with several layers.

Kora players have traditionally come from jali families. A jali, or griot in French, is a musician, historian, storyteller and keeper of family histories. The skills are passed down the family line (Wikipedia). Jalis keep history alive in songs and stories. They sing family histories at weddings, give advice and help settle disputes. The best-known story they tell is the Epic of Sundiata, about Sundiata Keita, who founded the Mali Empire. In it, Sundiata is given a jali named Balla Fasséké as his adviser. The Kouyaté family of jalis still traces its line back to him. Women jalis are central to the tradition too. In jali families, men have more often played instruments such as the kora, and women have more often been the singers. In Mali today, women performers often lead on commercial and international stages.

Toumani Diabaté (1965 to 2024) was born in Bamako, the capital of Mali, into one of the great kora families. His family's oral tradition counts 70 generations of musicians before him, passed from father to son. His father, Sidiki Diabaté, recorded the first-ever kora album, in 1970, and his mother, Nene Koita, was a singer. Toumani Diabaté won a Grammy Award in 2006 for an album with the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré. In 2008 he released The Mandé Variations, an album of solo kora recorded in London, which was nominated for a Grammy. His cousin Sona Jobarteh became the first woman from a jali family to play the kora professionally.

Comparing the two

The two traditions also share something important. Each layers free, improvised music over a part that repeats: the bell's timeline in Agbadza, the kumbengo on the kora. And each belongs to people, not just to performers: jali music is handed down inside families, and Agbadza is danced by whole communities.

Listening guide

• Agbadza at a funeral in the Volta Region, Ghana: a four-minute video filmed on 30 June 2018 and shared on Wikimedia Commons by the person who made it, under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 3.0). Listen for the high, ringing bell repeating its phrase under everything, the dry shake of the rattles, drums at different pitches, a lead singer and the crowd answering, and handclaps. Watch for the bird-like movements that give the dance its nickname.
• Toumani Diabaté, Cantelowes: the last track of The Mandé Variations (2008), on World Circuit Records' official YouTube channel. It lasts about seven minutes, and everything you hear is one person playing one kora. Listen for two layers at once: a repeating pattern underneath, and quick runs that break away from it and come back.

Common misconceptions

• "African music means drumming." Drums matter in many traditions, but in Mande music the kora, a plucked string instrument, is just as central, alongside singing.
• "There is one African style." Ewe dance-drumming and Mande kora music come from different peoples, in different countries, with different languages, instruments and ways of organising time. Neither stands for a whole continent.
• "West African drummers just improvise freely." Most parts are fixed. The bell, rattle and support drums repeat their patterns exactly, and the lead drum improvises inside that frame.
• "Jalis belong to the past." Jalis still sing at weddings and ceremonies today, and many, like Toumani Diabaté and Sona Jobarteh, record albums and tour the world.

Summing up

Ewe dance-drumming, from eastern Ghana, Togo and Benin, is music made by a whole ensemble. The gankogui bell plays a steady timeline, most often the seven-stroke standard pattern across twelve pulses. The axatse rattle and the kaganu repeat their parts, the kidi talks with the lead drum, and singers answer in call and response. Cross-rhythms, such as three against two, run through it all, and lead drummers can imitate the tones of the Ewe language. Agbadza grew out of the war dance Atrikpui in a time of peace around the 1920s. It is now played at funerals, weddings, parties and festivals, and everyone is welcome to dance. The kora, a 21-string harp-lute made from a gourd, belongs to the Mande jali, a hereditary musician and keeper of history. Skilled players combine a repeating kumbengo with improvised birimintingo runs, as Toumani Diabaté, heir to 70 generations of musicians, does in Cantelowes. Both traditions set improvisation over a repeating part, and both live inside families and communities.

Sources

1. Amuzujoe. (2018). Agbadza2 [Video of Agbadza dancing at a funeral in the Volta Region, Ghana; CC BY-SA 3.0]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
2. Diabaté, T. (2008). Cantelowes, from The Mandé Variations [Official audio]. World Circuit Records, YouTube. youtube.com
3. Locke, D. (2010). Yewevu in the metric matrix. Music Theory Online, 16(4). mtosmt.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ewe drumming; Agbadza; Bell pattern; Ewe language. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Kora (instrument); Griot. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Toumani Diabaté; The Mandé Variations. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Here is a challenge. Sit down in front of an audience with no written music and play for half an hour. Much of what you play will be made up on the spot. Yet every note must follow strict rules, your rhythm must stay locked to a cycle you share with a drummer, and the two of you must keep meeting on exactly the same beat. Musicians in North India do this every night. How?

The answer is that Indian classical music gives performers three tools that work together. A drone keeps the home note sounding. A raga sets the rules for the melody. A tala sets the cycle for the rhythm. Wikipedia's article on tala calls the raga and the tala the two foundations of classical Indian music. This lesson takes each tool in turn, then follows a performance by the sitar player Anupama Bhagwat and the tabla player Gurdain Rayatt.

India's two classical traditions

India has two great classical traditions. Hindustani music is the classical music of the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent, and it is the focus of this lesson. Carnatic music comes from South India. Its main emphasis is on vocal music: most Carnatic pieces are written to be sung, and even on instruments they are played in a singing style. Both traditions build their music from ragas and talas, though they name and organise them in their own ways.

Tool 1: the home note and the drone

Indian musicians name notes with sargam, a set of syllables like the solfège you met in Lesson 8: Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni and Sa again. As in movable-do solfège, Sa is the home note, the tonic, and the performer chooses its pitch. Two notes, Sa and Pa, are fixed anchors that are never altered. The other five can change. Komal means a half step lower, like a flat. Tivra, used only for Ma, means a half step higher, like a sharp. If Sa is C, the notes match the keyboard like this (Wikipedia, Svara):

Under the whole performance sounds the drone, notes held without stopping. In Hindustani music it is usually played on the tanpura, a long-necked string instrument that is not used to play a melody at all. Its four strings are usually tuned to Pa, Sa, Sa and a low Sa, so the home note and the note a fifth above it ring all the time. Every note of the melody is heard against that sound, so performers and listeners always know where home is.

Tool 2: the raga

The Sanskrit word raga means colouring or dyeing. Wikipedia defines a raga as a melodic framework for improvisation, a little like a mode, and stresses that a raga is more than a scale: many ragas share the same scale. A raga also sets how the melody moves up and down, which notes matter most, and which phrases make it recognisable.

Raag Jhinjhoti, the raga in this lesson's main recording, shows why. Here are its rules from Wikipedia, with Sa as C:

Notice three things. Going up, Jhinjhoti skips Ga and Ni. Coming down, it uses all seven notes, including komal Ni, and it zigzags near the end: Ga, Re, Ga, Sa. And although Ga is skipped on the way up, it is the raga's most important note. No scale on its own could tell you any of that.

Tool 3: the tala

A tala is a rhythmic cycle: a fixed number of beats, grouped into sections, that repeats from the start of a piece to the end. Its first beat is called sam. The most common tala in Hindustani music is tintal, also spelled teental, which means three claps. It has 16 beats in four sections of four. To keep it, you clap on beat 1, clap on beat 5, wave your hand on beat 9, and clap on beat 13. The wave marks the khali, the "empty" section. On the tabla the cycle has a basic pattern of drum syllables called a theka (Wikipedia, Teental):

Listen to how the khali sounds different. Dhin is the stroke Tin played together with a stroke on the bass drum, so when Dhin becomes Tin in the third section, the deep bass drops away. That change helps everyone hear where they are in the cycle.

A tala is not tied to one speed. The same cycle can be slow (vilambit), medium (madhya) or fast (drut). Wikipedia notes that musicians can deliberately play against the cycle, explore it, and then bring the music and the listeners back to its steady pattern of beats.

The core of it: the drone gives the home note, the raga gives the rules for the melody, and the tala gives the cycle for the rhythm. Inside those rules the musician is free to invent. Wikipedia calls raga and tala open frameworks that allow, in theory, an endless number of possibilities.

The sitar and the tabla

The sitar is a plucked string instrument of the Indian subcontinent. It was developed in the 18th century and reached its present form in the 19th. A sitar has 18 to 21 strings. Six or seven are played, running over curved, raised frets that can be moved for fine tuning. The rest are sympathetic strings: they run underneath the frets and are not plucked, but ring by themselves when the played strings sound their notes. The player plucks with a wire pick called a mizrab. By pulling a string sideways across a fret, a sitar player can bend a note up by as much as seven half steps. This technique is called meend.

The tabla is a pair of hand drums, and since the 18th century it has been the main percussion instrument of Hindustani classical music. The smaller drum, the dayan, is played with the stronger hand and gives high, tuned sounds. The larger drum, the bayan, gives the bass, and players press it with the hand to change its pitch as they play. The black circle on each drum head, called syahi, is made from layers of starch paste mixed with a black powder, and it lets the drums ring with clear overtones. Every stroke has a spoken name, a bol, such as Na, Tin or Ghe, and strokes combine: Dha is Na and Ghe played together. The syllables are passed on out loud, from teacher to student.

Zakir Hussain (1951 to 2024) was born in Mumbai, the eldest son of the great tabla player Alla Rakha. Wikipedia describes him as widely regarded as the greatest tabla player of his generation. He lived for much of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and played with musicians from many traditions. The guitarist John McLaughlin, his bandmate in the group Shakti, called him "the King, in whose hands, rhythm became magic." In 2023 India awarded him the Padma Vibhushan.

The shape of a performance

A Hindustani performance usually grows in stages, getting faster and more rhythmic as it goes (Wikipedia):

Anupama Bhagwat's Jhinjhoti at the Darbar Festival comes in two parts on the festival's official channel: Part 1 is a slow gat, and Part 2 is a fast gat in drut tintal, both with Gurdain Rayatt on tabla. Bhagwat was born in Bhilai in central India. She began the sitar at nine, and at thirteen started training with Bimalendu Mukherjee, a leading musician of the Imdadkhani gharana. A gharana is a school of musicians linked by family or by apprenticeship, and by a shared style; the word comes from ghar, meaning house. The Imdadkhani gharana is named after Imdad Khan, who, Wikipedia notes, first added sympathetic strings to the sitar. The Darbar Festival itself was founded in 2005 in Leicester by Sandeep Virdee in memory of his father, the tabla teacher Gurmit Singh Virdee. It is now based in London and presents both Hindustani and Carnatic music.

Listening guide

• Anupama Bhagwat, sitar, and Gurdain Rayatt, tabla: Raag Jhinjhoti, Part 1 (slow gat) and Part 2 (drut tintal). Both are on the Darbar Festival's official YouTube channel and last about six minutes each. In Part 1, listen for the sitar's bending notes (meend) and the ringing of the sympathetic strings, and try to hear the tabla's cycle coming round again. In Part 2, keep tintal with your hands: clap, clap, wave, clap, four beats each. Try to find the sam, the first beat of each cycle.
• Zakir Hussain, tabla solo, on Berklee College of Music's official channel, about nine minutes. Listen for the two drums: the high, ringing dayan and the deep bayan, which slides up and down in pitch as he presses it. Try saying "dha" or "tin" when you think you hear one.
• Carnatic music for comparison: on the Darbar channel, Jayanthi Kumaresh plays a thillana in Raga Kapi on the Saraswati veena, a large South Indian plucked string instrument. A thillana is a rhythmic piece usually performed at the end of a Carnatic concert.

Common misconceptions

• "Indian classical music is all made up on the spot." There are fixed compositions, such as the gat, and strict rules in every raga and tala. The improvisation happens inside them.
• "A raga is just a scale." Many ragas share the same scale. A raga also sets how the melody moves up and down, its most important notes and its typical phrases, as Jhinjhoti shows.
• "The drone is just background." The drone keeps the home note and its fifth sounding, and every note of the melody is heard against it.
• "The sitar is thousands of years old." The sitar was developed in the 18th century and reached its present form in the 19th.

Pulling it together

Hindustani musicians can improvise for a long time without getting lost because three tools hold the music together. The drone, usually on the tanpura, keeps Sa and Pa sounding. Sa is the home note of sargam, Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, and the other notes can be made komal or tivra. A raga, more than a scale, sets the notes, the way up and the way down, the important notes and the typical phrases; Raag Jhinjhoti skips Ga and Ni going up, zigzags on the way down, and makes Ga its most important note. A tala sets the rhythmic cycle: tintal has 16 beats, with claps on 1, 5 and 13 and a wave on the khali at 9, and every cycle begins on the sam. A performance grows from alap through jor and jhala to the gat, where the tabla joins. Zakir Hussain made the tabla famous around the world. Carnatic music, the classical music of South India, is built on raga and tala too, with singing at its centre.

Sources

1. Bhagwat, A. and Rayatt, G. (n.d.). Fabulous Jhinjhoti (Pt. 1): Slow gat [Video]. darbarfestival, YouTube. youtube.com
2. Bhagwat, A. and Rayatt, G. (n.d.). Fabulous Jhinjhoti (Pt. 2): Drut tintal [Video]. darbarfestival, YouTube. youtube.com
3. Berklee College of Music. (n.d.). Zakir Hussain meets Berklee: Ustad Zakir Hussain tabla solo [Video]. YouTube. youtube.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Raga; Svara; Jhinjhoti; Tanpura; Alap; Bandish. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Tala (music); Teental; Tabla. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Sitar; Zakir Hussain (musician); Darbar Festival; Gharana; Carnatic music. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Imagine walking into a room with a gamelan in it. You see rows of bronze bars on carved wooden frames, sets of small gongs lying on cords in wooden cases, large gongs hanging from a frame, drums, a bamboo flute and a two-stringed fiddle. A gamelan is not one instrument but a whole ensemble, made to be played together. The word comes from the Javanese gamel, which means to strike with a mallet. In 2021 UNESCO added gamelan to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a list of living traditions from around the world.

Gamelan is the traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese and Balinese peoples of Indonesia. Most of its instruments are metallophones: instruments with tuned metal bars or gongs, struck with mallets, usually made of bronze. Drums called kendhang lead the tempo and the changes from one section to the next, and there may be a bamboo flute (suling), a bowed string instrument (rebab) and singers. The music can sound like a shimmering wall of bells at first. The procedure below will help you hear how it is built.

The procedure: how to listen to a Javanese gamelan piece

1. Find the gong. Listen for the deepest, longest-ringing sound. It marks the end of each cycle.
2. Find the core melody. Listen for steady, even notes in the middle of the sound, played on bronze bars. That is the balungan.
3. Count the cycle. Count the steady beats from one gong stroke to the next.
4. Find the punctuation. Listen for smaller gongs that land at regular points inside the cycle.
5. Notice the decorations. Faster instruments, the flute, the fiddle and voices all play their own versions of the core melody at once.
6. Follow the drum. Listen for the kendhang leading changes of speed and the ending.

Steps 1 and 2: the gong and the core melody

The balungan, Javanese for skeleton or frame, is the core melody of a gamelan piece. Wikipedia explains that it is played in a slow, even rhythm, mainly on the saron family: bronze bars resting over a wooden frame, struck with a mallet while the other hand grasps the previous bar to stop it ringing. Gamelan players write the balungan in a number notation called kepatihan, with each note of the tuning given a number.

The other instruments then play their own versions of the balungan at the same time: faster, decorated, or spread across more octaves. Many versions of one melody sounding at once is a texture called heterophony, and Wikipedia describes gamelan music as heterophonic. It is a fourth texture to add to the three from Lesson 12.

Steps 3 and 4: the gong cycle

Javanese gamelan music is organised in cycles marked by gongs of different sizes. This is called colotomy, from Greek words meaning dividing into units, a term invented by the scholar Jaap Kunst. The biggest gong marks the biggest cycle. Smaller gongs divide it into halves, quarters and eighths, each size playing once per section. The instruments that do this are called colotomic instruments, and their Javanese names imitate their sounds: gong, kempul, kenong and kethuk.

The shortest of the main forms is the lancaran, which is usually played fast. Its cycle has 16 beats (Wikipedia, Colotomy):

Read it as a set of nested cycles. The gong plays once, on beat 16. The kenong divides the cycle into four, on beats 4, 8, 12 and 16. The kempul divides each of those in two, on beats 6, 10 and 14. Beat 2 is a deliberate gap called wela, because the gong has only just sounded. The kethuk divides things in two again, on every odd beat.

Here is the surprise. In Western music the strong beat is the first beat of the bar, the downbeat. In Javanese gamelan, each group of four notes has its strong beat at the end, and the most important gongs land on those final beats. The gong does not start the cycle; it completes it. It is the opposite of the Indian sam you met in Lesson 19, which comes first.

The ketawang is a longer, more stately form. Its 16-beat cycle has the kenong only twice, on beats 8 and 16, the kempul on beat 12, and a still smaller gong, the kempyang, ticking on every odd beat. Wikipedia notes that it developed at the court of Prince Mangkunegara IV of Surakarta, who reigned from 1853 to 1881, and that ketawang often start at a moderate speed and then slow down.

Tuning: slendro and pelog

Gamelan uses two tuning systems. Slendro has five notes in the octave, and in Java they are roughly equally spaced. Five equal steps means each step is about one fifth of an octave, a little wider than a whole step, which is one sixth of an octave. Pelog has seven notes with uneven steps, though many pieces use only five of them, and some gamelans only have bars for five.

Neither tuning matches a piano. The piano divides the octave into twelve equal half steps, and slendro's five near-equal steps fall between the piano's keys, so even the black-key pentatonic scale from Lesson 9 is only a rough copy. And there is no single standard pitch: Wikipedia explains that tunings vary from one gamelan to the next, while the instruments within one gamelan are tuned closely to each other. Each gamelan is a family with its own voice, and you cannot borrow a gong from another set.

Bottom line: a Javanese gamelan piece is a set of nested cycles. The core melody moves steadily. The gongs mark off its cycle, from the smallest unit to the largest, with the strongest points at the ends. Many instruments decorate the same melody at once, all in a tuning that belongs to that one ensemble.

Bali: kotekan and gong kebyar

Bali is the island just east of Java. Wikipedia notes that almost every village there has a gamelan, used both in Hindu worship and in community life. The most famous Balinese style is gong kebyar. Kebyar means to flare up or burst open, and the style is known for explosive changes of tempo and loudness, brilliant sounds and syncopation. It was first documented in North Bali in the early 1900s. Its first public performance was at a gamelan competition in Jagaraga, North Bali, in December 1915. Gong kebyar uses a five-note form of pelog called selisir.

Its signature sound is kotekan: fast interlocking parts. Two players share one line. One part is called polos and the other sangsih. Each fills the gaps left by the other, so together they sound like a single melody, faster than any one person could play. In the simplest kind, each player plays every other note of the line. Kotekan is played on the high bronze metallophones, the gangsa, and on the reyong, a row of small gongs.

Balinese gamelan is played far beyond Bali. Gamelan Sekar Jaya was founded in 1979 in the San Francisco Bay Area by I Wayan Suweca, Rachel Ann Cooper and Michael Tenzer. It was the first community-based Balinese gamelan in the United States. Its players are mostly American volunteers, taught by visiting artists from Bali.

Listening guide

• Lancaran Marta Yogiswara, pelog barang: played by the Javanese gamelan group Karawitan Marta Yogiswara (karawitan means classical gamelan music) and shared on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 4.0); about three minutes. Use the procedure: find the deep gong, then the steady core melody. If the beats go by too fast to count, count the kenong strokes instead: there are four in each gong cycle.
• Ketawang Sekar Teja, slendro manyura: by the same group, also on Commons; about seven minutes. Compare its tuning with the pelog lancaran. Does it start at one speed and then slow down, as many ketawang do?
• Gamelan Sekar Jaya, interlocking clips and Gong Kebyar Reel 2025: short videos on the ensemble's own YouTube channel. Watch the players of the high metallophones: can you see two players sharing one fast line? Listen for kebyar bursts where the whole ensemble suddenly strikes together.

Common misconceptions

• "A gamelan is one instrument." It is an ensemble of many instruments, mostly metallophones and gongs, with drums, flute, fiddle and voices, built and tuned to be played together.
• "Gamelan music is free and unplanned." It rests on a composed core melody and strict gong cycles, and every player knows exactly where they are in the cycle.
• "The strong beat always comes first." In Javanese gamelan, the strong beat of each group of four comes at the end, and the gong completes the cycle.
• "Gamelan is out of tune." Slendro and pelog are tuning systems of their own. Each gamelan is carefully tuned as a set; it simply does not use the piano's twelve equal half steps.

Looking back

A gamelan is an Indonesian ensemble of mostly bronze metallophones and gongs, with drums, flute, fiddle and voices. In 2021 UNESCO added it to its list of the world's living cultural heritage. To hear a Javanese piece, find the gong, then the balungan, the steady core melody on the sarons, then count the cycle and the punctuating gongs. Colotomy divides time into nested cycles. In a 16-beat lancaran the gong falls on beat 16, the kenong on 4, 8, 12 and 16, the kempul on 6, 10 and 14 and the kethuk on the odd beats. The strong beats come at the ends of groups. Other instruments decorate the balungan at the same time, a texture called heterophony. Slendro has five roughly equal steps and pelog has seven uneven ones, and every gamelan has its own tuning. In Bali, gong kebyar, first performed publicly in 1915, bursts with sudden changes. Its kotekan uses two interlocking parts to make one line faster than any single player could play.

Sources

1. Karawitan Marta Yogiswara. (2026). Lancaran Marta Yogiswara, pelog barang [Audio recording, CC BY-SA 4.0]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
2. Karawitan Marta Yogiswara. (2026). Ketawang Sekar Teja, slendro manyura [Audio recording, CC BY-SA 4.0]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
3. Gamelan Sekar Jaya. (n.d.). Interlocking madness #1 [Video]. YouTube. youtube.com
4. Gamelan Sekar Jaya. (2025). Gong kebyar reel 2025 [Video]. YouTube. youtube.com
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Gamelan; Colotomy; Balungan; Saron (instrument). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Slendro; Pelog; Kotekan; Gamelan gong kebyar; Gamelan Sekar Jaya. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

In January 1917, a record called Pelo Telefone went on sale in Rio de Janeiro, and the song became a huge success. Nearly eighty years later, in March 1996, veteran Cuban musicians gathered in a Havana studio and recorded a song called Chan Chan. The album it opened became the best-selling world music album ever, according to Guinness World Records. One recording is samba from Brazil; the other is son from Cuba. Both styles grew where African and European musical traditions met in the Americas, and both became symbols of their countries. This lesson compares them side by side.

Son cubano: where it came from

Son cubano, or simply son, is a genre of music and dance. It began in the highlands of eastern Cuba in the late 19th century. Wikipedia describes it as a blend of Spanish and African elements. From Spain came its singing style, the patterns of its verses, and the tres. The tres is a small guitar-like instrument whose name means three: it has three pairs of strings, six in all. From African traditions, especially those of Bantu origin, came its key rhythm, the clave, and its call-and-response singing. African traditions also gave son its percussion, such as maracas and the bongó, a pair of small hand drums.

Son reached Havana around 1909, and the first son recordings were made in 1917. In 1920 the Sexteto Habanero set the classic line-up of six: guitar, tres, bongó, claves, maracas and double bass. In the 1930s many groups added a trumpet and became septetos. Son grew into Cuba's most popular and influential music, and salsa and the cha-cha-chá both come from it. In 2025 UNESCO added the practice of Cuban son to its list of the world's living cultural heritage.

The clave: the key to the rhythm

The clave (say CLAH-vay) is a short rhythm that holds Afro-Cuban music together. It is also the name of the instrument that often plays it: claves, a pair of hardwood sticks. The word means key in Spanish. Count 16 quick, even pulses, two bars of 4/4 split into eighth notes, and play on the pulses marked X (Wikipedia, Clave):

The first half has three strokes and the second half has two, so musicians call this pattern 3-2 clave. In some songs the halves are swapped, giving 2-3. The three strokes of the first half also have their own name, tresillo. There is a link to Lesson 18 here. Wikipedia notes that the son clave, a related pattern called rumba clave, and the standard bell pattern are the most widely used guide patterns in African music south of the Sahara. Son clave can also be played in a twelve-pulse cycle. Then its five strokes fall on pulses 1, 3, 5, 8 and 10: five of the seven strokes of the standard pattern you clapped in Lesson 18.

Chan Chan

The Cuban singer and guitarist Compay Segundo, born Francisco Repilado in 1907, wrote Chan Chan in 1984. His nickname comes from segundo, second, because he always sang the second voice. He said he did not compose Chan Chan but dreamt it. He woke up with the melody in his head and later added words based on a children's tale he remembered. Its words tell a story set among small towns in Holguín Province, in eastern Cuba, the region where son was born.

In 1996 Nick Gold, a British producer at World Circuit Records, and the American guitarist Ry Cooder brought together a group of older Cuban musicians in Havana. The Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos González helped direct them. They recorded at the EGREM studios, whose equipment had hardly changed since the 1950s. Chan Chan opened the album, Buena Vista Social Club, released in 1997. Eliades Ochoa sang lead, and Compay Segundo, then 88, sang second voice. The album won a Grammy Award in 1998. In 2022 it was added to the United States National Recording Registry.

Chan Chan is built on four chords repeated over and over: Dm, F, Gm and A7 (Wikipedia). In the key of D minor, those are the chords on scale degrees 1, 3, 4 and 5. In the Roman numerals from Lesson 10 they are i, III, iv and V7. The A7 chord is A, C-sharp, E and G. Its C-sharp replaces the C of the D natural minor scale, and it pulls strongly up to D, sending the loop back to the start. Cooder called the song the band's calling card.

Like many son songs, Chan Chan ends with a montuno. This is a final section that is faster and partly improvised, over a repeating pattern, often with a short refrain sung by the group. In son, the lead singer is called the sonero, and the verb sonear means both to sing son and to improvise.

Samba: where it came from

Samba is a family of Brazilian rhythms and styles with roots in West African musical traditions. It grew in the Afro-Brazilian communities of Bahia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After slavery was abolished in Brazil, many Black Bahians moved to Rio de Janeiro, then the capital. Their community near the port came to be called Little Africa, and urban samba took shape there. Wikipedia records that early samba musicians faced police persecution, because their drumming was linked to Afro-Brazilian religions that suffered discrimination. Gatherings were shut down, musicians were arrested and instruments were destroyed, so samba survived in people's homes.

Many of those homes belonged to Bahian women known as the Tias, or aunts. The house of Tia Ciata, near Praça Onze, was a meeting place for religion, food, dance and music. Pelo Telefone was created there in 1916 by a circle of musicians, including Donga, Pixinguinha, João da Baiana and Sinhô. Donga registered it under his own name at the National Library of Brazil on 27 November 1916, and others disputed that for years. The singer Baiano's recording came out on the Odeon label in January 1917. The National Library counts it as the first samba recorded in Brazil. Wikipedia notes that a few earlier recordings also used the name samba.

From 1928, samba musicians from the Estácio neighbourhood of Rio, including Ismael Silva, founded the first samba schools. The first was called Deixa Falar, meaning Let Them Talk. A samba school is not a school with classrooms. It is a community club that dances, drums and rehearses all year to compete in the Carnival parade. Today each school's drum section, the bateria, has around 250 to 300 musicians. The parades in Rio take place in a purpose-built stadium, the Sambadrome. Samba has become one of the main symbols of Brazilian identity, and in 2005 UNESCO recognised samba de roda from Bahia as world cultural heritage.

The instruments of a samba bateria

Samba is felt in two: one, two, one, two. The surdo's deep stroke on beat two, instead of beat one, gives samba its forward-leaning swing.

Comparing son and samba

What matters here: son and samba are not one "Latin" style. They grew in different countries and languages, from different mixes of African and European traditions. Each has its own key rhythm: the clave in son, the surdo's beat two in samba. What they share is that Black communities shaped them, and that both became national music.

Listening guide

• Buena Vista Social Club, Chan Chan: the official audio on World Circuit Records' YouTube channel, about four and a half minutes. Listen for the four-chord loop on the guitars, which never changes, and try to hear the moment the music moves from D minor to F major and back. Listen for Eliades Ochoa's lead voice with Compay Segundo singing below him, and for the bongó and the clave holding the groove. Can you tell when the music changes into the montuno?
• Pelo Telefone: a recording from the sound archive of the National Library of Brazil, public domain on Wikimedia Commons, about four minutes. It is more than a hundred years old, so expect crackle. Listen for the sound of an early band and singers, and compare its feel with the drum-heavy samba of a modern bateria that you may know from Carnival.

Common misconceptions

• "Latin music is one style." Son, samba, salsa, cumbia and many more come from different countries and traditions. Brazilians speak Portuguese, not Spanish.
• "Salsa and son are the same thing." Salsa grew out of son, much later, but they are different styles.
• "Clave is just an instrument." Clave is first a rhythm, the pattern that holds the music together. The instrument called claves, two sticks, is named after it.
• "Samba was always celebrated." In its early years in Rio, samba gatherings were broken up by police and musicians were arrested. It became a national symbol only later.

The takeaway

Son cubano began in the highlands of eastern Cuba in the late 19th century. It blends Spanish song, verse and the tres with African, especially Bantu, rhythm, call and response and percussion. Its key rhythm is the clave: on 16 pulses, strokes on 1, 4, 7, 11 and 13, a cousin of the standard bell pattern. Compay Segundo wrote Chan Chan in 1984, and Buena Vista Social Club recorded it in Havana in 1996. It loops four chords, Dm, F, Gm and A7, and ends in a montuno. Samba grew in the Afro-Brazilian communities of Bahia and then in Rio de Janeiro, where it survived police persecution in homes like Tia Ciata's. Pelo Telefone, released in 1917, is counted as the first recorded samba. From 1928, samba schools made samba the great parade music of Carnival. In a samba bateria the surdo marks beat two, while tamborim, caixa, cuíca and others add interlocking layers.

Sources

1. Buena Vista Social Club. (1997). Chan Chan [Official audio]. World Circuit Records, YouTube. youtube.com
2. Donga (composer). (1917). Pelo Telefone [Audio recording, public domain]. National Library of Brazil, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Son cubano; Tres (instrument); Montuno. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Clave (rhythm). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Chan Chan (song); Buena Vista Social Club (album). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Samba; Pelo Telefone; Samba school; Surdo; Cuíca; Tamborim; Pandeiro. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

In 1903 a bandleader named W. C. Handy was waiting for a train at the station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in the region called the Mississippi Delta. Handy was a trained musician who led a band of Black musicians in nearby Clarksdale. While he waited, he heard a Black man playing the guitar, sliding a knife along the strings so that the notes slid and moaned. Handy later wrote about that moment as one that shaped his music. He later called himself the Father of the Blues, and he became one of the first to publish blues songs as sheet music. But Wikipedia is clear that he did not create the blues. The music he heard that day was already being played and sung all over the South.

Where the blues came from

Open Music Theory explains that the earliest blues songs existed in the late 1800s. They grew out of older African American music, such as the field hollers and work songs of people who had been enslaved, and from the rhythms and sliding pitches of West African music. One of the earliest blues styles came from the Mississippi Delta, where guitar and harmonica were the main instruments and slide guitar, like the knife Handy heard, was a hallmark of the sound. Delta musicians such as Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson recorded between 1929 and 1937.

The blues spread through Black communities in the South and then north to cities such as Memphis, St. Louis and Chicago. It became the root of much of the music in the rest of this module: jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and more.

The twelve-bar blues

Most blues songs use a chord plan called the twelve-bar blues. It is twelve bars of 4/4 in three phrases of four bars each. Open Music Theory gives the basic version, using the Roman numerals from Lesson 10:

Then the twelve bars start again, as many times as the song needs: the blues is a strophic form, like the songs in Lesson 16. In a standard blues every chord is played as a seventh chord, such as C7, F7 and G7, which adds a note a minor seventh above the root. And instead of ending phrases with V going to I, the blues likes to arrive home from IV, as in bars 10 and 11.

AAB: how blues verses work

Blues lyrics usually follow a pattern that Open Music Theory calls aab. The singer sings a line, sings the same line again, sometimes with a small change, and then sings a different line that answers it and rhymes with it. Each line fills one four-bar phrase. Handy wrote in his autobiography that the third line explains why the first two lines were said. Make up your own example about something ordinary: a line about the rain, the same line again, then a line that says what you will do about it.

The blues also leaves room for call and response. Open Music Theory notes that the singer often sings only in the first two bars of each phrase, and an instrument answers in the gap. That habit is likely inherited from the work songs of enslaved Africans and African Americans.

Blue notes and the blues scale

Blues singers and players often bend notes. A blue note is a note whose pitch falls somewhere between the flat and the natural version of a scale degree, especially the third and the seventh. In the key of C, a blue third sits somewhere between E-flat and E. No piano key can play it, but a voice, a guitar or a trumpet can.

To give players a starting point, musicians use the blues scale. Open Music Theory describes it as a minor pentatonic scale, from Lesson 9, with one extra note, a chromatic passing note leading up to the fifth. On C it runs:

Played over the major chords C, F and G, the E-flat and B-flat of the scale clash with the E and B in the chords. That rub is part of the sound of the blues.

So what: three simple ideas, a twelve-bar chord plan, an AAB verse and a few bent notes, gave musicians a frame that anyone could learn and no one could exhaust. Singers could tell any story in it, and players could improvise inside it night after night.

The blues on record

For years the record companies hardly recorded Black singers at all. That changed on 10 August 1920, when Mamie Smith recorded Crazy Blues, written by the African American songwriter Perry Bradford, for the Okeh label in New York. Wikipedia describes her as the first African American artist to make vocal blues recordings. Crazy Blues sold a million copies in less than a year, many of them to Black buyers, and record companies began searching for more blues singers.

Two great singers followed. Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, from Columbus, Georgia, had been singing the blues in touring shows for years. She made her first recordings for Paramount in Chicago in December 1923 and became known as the Mother of the Blues. Bessie Smith grew up poor in Chattanooga, Tennessee, singing on street corners for coins. She toured in a group that included Ma Rainey, then went out on her own. Her first record for Columbia, in 1923, was a hit, and she became the highest-paid Black entertainer of her day, nicknamed the Empress of the Blues.

St. Louis Blues

W. C. Handy published St. Louis Blues in September 1914, and it became one of the first blues songs to succeed as a pop song. Its form is unusual. The verses are standard twelve-bar blues with AAB lyrics, but there is also a 16-bar section in a habanera rhythm, a Latin American dance rhythm. Handy described it as a tango, and the pianist Jelly Roll Morton called this kind of rhythm the Spanish tinge. Handy wrote that he used a tango introduction to surprise dancers before breaking into the blues.

On 14 January 1925, Bessie Smith recorded St. Louis Blues for Columbia, with the young Louis Armstrong playing the cornet, a small trumpet-like brass instrument. The record came out on 10 April 1925 and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1993.

Listening guide: Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, St. Louis Blues (1925)

• The recording: public domain on Wikimedia Commons, about three minutes. It was recorded more than a hundred years ago, so expect hiss.
• Count the twelve bars: tap four beats to a bar and try to feel each four-bar phrase. Notice where a sung line is repeated and where a new, answering line comes.
• Call and response: listen for Armstrong's cornet in the gaps after Smith's lines.
• The habanera section: listen for the place where the rhythm changes to a tango-like feel, then returns to the blues.
• Blue notes: listen for notes Smith slides into or bends, which a piano could not play exactly.

Common misconceptions

• "W. C. Handy invented the blues." He published some of the first blues songs and called himself the Father of the Blues, but the blues was already being sung across the South.
• "The blues is always sad." Many blues songs are funny, proud or defiant, and the blues was dance music too. The name describes a feeling and a form, not only sadness.
• "Blue notes are wrong notes." Blue notes are bent on purpose, between flat and natural. They are one of the defining sounds of the style.
• "The first blues singers were all men with guitars." The first blues hits on record were sung by women, Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

What to remember

The blues grew in Black communities in the American South in the late 1800s, out of field hollers, work songs and West African musical traits. One early style came from the Mississippi Delta, with guitar, harmonica and slide guitar, as W. C. Handy heard at Tutwiler in 1903. The twelve-bar blues runs I, I, I, I; IV, IV, I, I; V, IV, I, I, often all as seventh chords, and repeats for every verse. Verses follow an AAB pattern, and the singer often leaves gaps for an instrument to answer. Blue notes fall between flat and natural, and the C blues scale is C, E-flat, F, F-sharp, G and B-flat. Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues, recorded in 1920, was the first vocal blues by an African American singer and sold a million copies. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith followed from 1923. Bessie Smith's 1925 St. Louis Blues, with Louis Armstrong on cornet, joins Handy's twelve-bar verses to a habanera section.

Sources

1. Smith, B. and Armstrong, L. (1925). St. Louis Blues [Audio recording, Columbia, public domain]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
2. Hughes, B. and Lavengood, M. (n.d.). Blues harmony. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). viva.pressbooks.pub
3. Lavengood, M. (n.d.). Blues melodies and the blues scale. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). viva.pressbooks.pub
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). W. C. Handy; Saint Louis Blues (song); Delta blues. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Mamie Smith; Ma Rainey; Bessie Smith. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Who invented jazz? Ask around in the early 20th century and you would have heard several confident answers. The pianist Jelly Roll Morton claimed that he had invented jazz himself, in 1902. A band of white New Orleans musicians called the Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first jazz record ever released, in 1917, and billed themselves as the Creators of Jazz. And many of the older New Orleans musicians said that it all started with a cornet player named Buddy Bolden, years before anyone made a record. This lesson weighs the evidence for each claim, then listens to how early jazz actually works.

The evidence: a square in New Orleans

Start before any of those people were born. In colonial New Orleans in the 1700s, enslaved Africans were usually given Sundays off. From 1817 a city ordinance allowed them to gather in only one place, which became known as Congo Square, just outside the old city. There they held a market and sang, danced and played music. They used drums, gourds, banjo-like instruments and European instruments such as the violin.

Wikipedia notes that Sunday gatherings with African-based dances to drums went on there until 1843. Rhythms from the square can still be heard in New Orleans music today. One of them is the tresillo, the three-stroke rhythm you met in Lesson 21. The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis calls the tresillo the New Orleans clave.

The evidence: Buddy Bolden

Charles "Buddy" Bolden was born in New Orleans in 1877. His band was at its peak from about 1900 to 1907, and he was famous for a loud, powerful cornet sound and for improvising. Wikipedia reports that he is credited with a looser, more improvised version of ragtime, the style you met in Lesson 4, and with adding the blues. His band was said to be the first to have brass instruments play the blues. He also drew on the gospel music of Black Baptist churches.

Younger players, including Joe "King" Oliver, were directly inspired by Bolden. In 1907 he became seriously ill and spent the rest of his life in a hospital, where he died in 1931. His trombonist remembered making cylinder recordings with the band, but none are known to survive. So the musician many people call the first jazzman is one we cannot hear.

The evidence: Jelly Roll Morton

Jelly Roll Morton, born in New Orleans's Creole community around 1885, was a brilliant pianist and composer. His Jelly Roll Blues, published in 1915, was one of the first jazz compositions to be published, and Wikipedia calls him jazz's first arranger: he showed that music rooted in improvisation could be written down without losing its character. But his claim to have invented jazz in 1902 was criticised, even by people who admired his music. Morton himself recorded a song in tribute to the New Orleans musicians of those early years, called I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say.

The evidence: the first record

The Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded Livery Stable Blues for Victor on 26 February 1917, and it was released that May as the first jazz record. Wikipedia notes that its members were white, and that its leader, Nick LaRocca, argued that his band deserved the credit for establishing jazz. Being first on record, however, is not the same as being first to play. Record companies had barely begun to record Black musicians. As you saw in Lesson 22, it took until 1920, and Mamie Smith, for a record company to break the colour barrier in recording Black singers of the blues.

Key idea: jazz had no single inventor. It grew in New Orleans around 1900, among Black and Creole musicians. They mixed brass-band marches, ragtime, the blues, church music and Caribbean rhythms, with roots reaching back to Congo Square. A white band made the first record, but that made them its first recording artists, not its creators.

How New Orleans jazz works

A classic New Orleans band has a front line of three melody instruments: a cornet or trumpet, a clarinet and a trombone. Behind them is a rhythm section of at least two of these: banjo or guitar, string bass or tuba, piano and drums. One instrument, usually the cornet, plays the tune or a version of it. The others make up their own lines around it at the same time. Wikipedia describes this as collective improvisation, and it makes a texture you know from Lesson 12: polyphony, several independent lines at once.

Jazz also has a different feel for rhythm. Open Music Theory explains that jazz musicians play eighth notes unevenly, in what are called swing eighths. Each pair is played long-short, with the first note roughly twice as long as the second, like a triplet whose first two notes are joined:

The written music looks the same either way: players simply know to swing. The exact ratio varies from player to player, and faster tempos tend to swing less. Jazz drummers also often accent beats 2 and 4, the backbeat you met in Lesson 4.

Dippermouth Blues

King Oliver had moved from New Orleans to Chicago in 1918. In 1922, at the Lincoln Gardens on Chicago's South Side, a venue that admitted only Black customers, he led King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. He invited a young New Orleans cornet player, Louis Armstrong, to join him on second cornet. Wikipedia notes that white musicians came to learn from the band, listening from outside the door. In 1923 the band made records that brought New Orleans collective improvisation to a wide audience. On Dippermouth Blues, Oliver and Armstrong play cornets, Johnny Dodds clarinet, Honoré Dutrey trombone, Lil Hardin piano, Baby Dodds drums and Bill Johnson banjo.

Dippermouth Blues is built on the twelve-bar blues from Lesson 22, with many bent notes and slides. Its most famous moment is Oliver's own cornet solo, played with a mute. A mute is an object put in or over the bell of a brass instrument to change its sound. Oliver was a pioneer of mutes, using plumber's plungers, hats, bottles and cups. Wikipedia notes that he worked out this solo in advance and played it the same way on both 1923 recordings. It became one of the most imitated solos of its time.

After New Orleans

Louis Armstrong, born in New Orleans in 1901, soon changed jazz again. Wikipedia describes him as shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to the solo. His Hot Five recordings, from 1925, made him famous for brilliant trumpet solos. In 1926, on Heebie Jeebies, he helped make scat singing popular: improvising with the voice on made-up, nonsense syllables.

Duke Ellington, from Washington, D.C., opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York, in 1927. He built an orchestra famous for its rich colours and its compositions. He preferred to call his music American music, and he liked to describe musicians he admired as beyond category. In the 1930s, big bands played swing for dancers across the country, and some of their soloists became as famous as the bandleaders.

Then, in the early 1940s in New York, a group of musicians created bebop. They included the saxophonist Charlie Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, the pianist Thelonious Monk and the drummer Max Roach. Bebop was small-group jazz played at faster tempos, with complex harmonies, made more for listening than for dancing.

Listening guide: King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Dippermouth Blues (1923)

• The recording: public domain on Wikimedia Commons, about two and a half minutes. Recordings from 1923 entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.
• Count the twelve bars: tap four beats in each bar and listen for each new chorus of twelve bars.
• The front line: in the full-band sections, try to follow one cornet line, then switch to the clarinet weaving around it, then to the trombone underneath. That is collective improvisation.
• Oliver's muted solo: listen for the cornet sound that seems to say "wah" as the mute opens and closes.
• Swing: listen for long-short pairs of eighth notes in the melody lines.

Common misconceptions

• "Jazz was invented by one person." Several people claimed it, but jazz grew from a whole community of Black and Creole musicians in New Orleans.
• "The first jazz record means the first jazz band." The first released record was by a white band in 1917, but Black musicians such as Bolden had been playing the music for years.
• "Improvisation means playing anything at all." Jazz improvisers work inside a structure, such as the twelve-bar blues, and listen closely to each other.
• "Swing just means fast." Swing is a long-short feel for eighth notes and a groove. It can be slow or fast.

What to carry forward

Several people claimed to have invented jazz. They included Jelly Roll Morton and the white Original Dixieland Jass Band, whose Livery Stable Blues of 1917 was the first jazz record released. The evidence points to a community instead. Black and Creole musicians in New Orleans around 1900 drew on ragtime, blues, brass bands, church music and rhythms reaching back to Congo Square, and Buddy Bolden's band was among the first.

New Orleans jazz uses a front line of cornet, clarinet and trombone improvising together over a rhythm section: collective improvisation. It swings, playing eighth notes long-short. King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band recorded Dippermouth Blues in 1923, a twelve-bar blues with Oliver's famous muted solo and Louis Armstrong on second cornet. Armstrong then made the solo central and popularised scat singing. Duke Ellington's orchestra opened at Harlem's Cotton Club in 1927, swing bands ruled the 1930s, and bebop arrived in New York in the 1940s.

Sources

1. King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. (1923). Dippermouth Blues [Audio recording, public domain]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
2. Lavengood, M. (n.d.). Swing rhythms. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). viva.pressbooks.pub
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Jazz; Dixieland jazz; Congo Square. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Buddy Bolden; Jelly Roll Morton; Original Dixieland Jass Band. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). King Oliver; Louis Armstrong; Dippermouth Blues. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Here is a sentence you might find on a poster or a quiz website: "Rock and roll was invented by Elvis Presley in 1954." It sounds confident, but it has three bugs in it: the word invented, the name Elvis Presley and the year 1954. This lesson debugs the sentence one bug at a time. Then it listens closely to the sound that the real pioneers created, in Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode.

Bug 1: "invented"

Wikipedia describes rock and roll as a style that grew in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Its roots are in African American music, mainly rhythm and blues, a style that began in African American communities in the 1940s. Rock and roll also drew on gospel, jazz, boogie-woogie piano and country music. Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, rhythm and blues artists such as Fats Domino and Johnny Otis were speeding up their tempos and strengthening the backbeat. Nobody invented rock and roll in a single moment. It grew, record by record.

Bug 2: "Elvis Presley"

Elvis Presley became rock and roll's biggest star. But many of the records that built the style came before him, and they were made by Black musicians:

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, born in 1915, mixed gospel songs with dazzling guitar playing, and by the 1940s she was recording on electric guitar. She is often called the Godmother of Rock and Roll, and in 2018 she entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early influence. The music business of the time was also divided by race: Wikipedia notes that before disc jockeys such as Alan Freed, Black music was kept off many white-owned radio stations.

Bug 3: "in 1954"

Elvis Presley recorded That's All Right at Sun Studio in Memphis on 5 July 1954. By then the music already had a name. In 1942 a Billboard columnist, Maurie Orodenker, was already using the term rock and roll to describe upbeat records such as Tharpe's Rock Me. In July 1951 the Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues on his radio show, and he popularised the name rock and roll. On 21 March 1952 he helped organise the Moondog Coronation Ball at the Cleveland Arena, now considered the first major rock and roll concert. Rock and roll was well on its way before 1954.

The point: rock and roll grew out of rhythm and blues, gospel and the blues, made by Black American musicians in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Elvis Presley became its most famous star, but he did not invent it, and his first single was a song by a Black blues singer. A fair version of the poster would name Tharpe, Crudup, Turner, Thornton, Berry and Little Richard alongside him.

What makes rock and roll sound like rock and roll

The straight eighths matter more than you might think. The music writer Michael Campbell argued that Rocket 88 was not the first rock and roll record, because its beat is a shuffle. The distinctive rock rhythm, he wrote, was heard first in the songs of Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

A power chord has only two different notes, a root and the note a fifth above it, sometimes with the root doubled an octave higher. It is written with a 5: C5 means C and G. Compare it with the triads from Lesson 10:

With no third to clash, power chords stay clear even through heavy distortion, which is why guitarists love them.

Chuck Berry and Johnny B. Goode

You met Chuck Berry, from St. Louis, Missouri, in Lesson 16. Johnny B. Goode, which he wrote and sang, was released by Chess Records of Chicago on 31 March 1958. It tells the story of a young guitar player from the countryside with a big talent. Wikipedia notes that it was first inspired by Berry's pianist, Johnnie Johnson, but became mainly a song about Berry himself, who was born on Goode Avenue in St. Louis. At the recording session, Lafayette Leake played piano, Willie Dixon bass and Fred Below drums.

Its famous opening guitar riff borrows from a 1946 record by Louis Jordan, where the guitarist Carl Hogan played a similar opening solo: rock and roll grew from rhythm and blues, note by note. Johnny B. Goode reached number two on the rhythm and blues chart, and in 1977 it was one of the 27 pieces of music sent into space on the Voyager Golden Record.

Listening guide

• Chuck Berry, Johnny B. Goode (1958): on Chuck Berry's official Topic channel on YouTube, where it is listed as Johnny Be Goode; it is under three minutes long. Listen for the opening guitar riff, the snare drum's backbeat, and something Wikipedia points out: the drums and piano swing, while Berry's lead guitar plays straight.
• Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, Rocket 88 (1951): on the official Topic channel. Listen for the fuzzy, distorted guitar sound and the piano introduction by Ike Turner. Little Richard later used the same introduction for his 1958 hit Good Golly, Miss Molly, and in 1999 he said the two were exactly the same. Can you hear the long-short shuffle feel that Campbell mentions?
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Didn't It Rain: also on her official Topic channel. Listen to how her voice and guitar drive a gospel song with the energy of rock and roll.

Common misconceptions

• "Elvis Presley invented rock and roll." He was its biggest star, but the style grew from rhythm and blues and gospel made by Black musicians, and his first single was Arthur Crudup's song.
• "There is one agreed first rock and roll record." Writers still argue over candidates, including Strange Things Happening Every Day (1944), Rocket 88 (1951) and That's All Right (1954).
• "A power chord is just a loud chord." It is a particular chord, a root and a fifth with no third, so it is neither major nor minor.
• "Rock and roll was made only for white teenagers." It grew out of Black American music and was played on the rhythm and blues charts first. Alan Freed's concerts were attended by racially mixed audiences.

The short version

The poster sentence has three bugs. Rock and roll was not invented: it grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s, mainly from rhythm and blues, which began in African American communities in the 1940s, with gospel, jazz, boogie-woogie and country mixed in. It was not one man's creation: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Arthur Crudup, Ike Turner's band on Rocket 88 (1951), Big Mama Thornton, Chuck Berry and Little Richard made key records, and Elvis Presley's first single in 1954 was a version of Crudup's 1946 song. And it was not born in 1954: Alan Freed was popularising the name on Cleveland radio from 1951. Its sound combines a snare-drum backbeat on 2 and 4, the electric guitar, blues chord plans, straight eighths and power chords, a root and a fifth with no third. Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode of 1958 puts it all together, from its famous riff to its straight guitar over a swinging band.

Sources

1. Berry, C. (1958). Johnny B. Goode [Audio recording, Chess; listed as Johnny Be Goode]. Chuck Berry - Topic, YouTube. youtube.com
2. Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats. (1951). Rocket 88 (Single Version) [Audio recording, Chess]. Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats - Topic, YouTube. youtube.com
3. Tharpe, S. R. (n.d.). Didn't It Rain [Audio recording]. Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Topic, YouTube. youtube.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Rock and roll; Rhythm and blues; Alan Freed; Power chord. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Sister Rosetta Tharpe; That's All Right; Rocket 88; Hound Dog (song). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Johnny B. Goode; Maybellene; Tutti Frutti (song). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On 11 August 1973, a teenager named Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. She wanted to earn money for new school clothes. Her family rented the small community room on the first floor of their apartment building, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, and she made flyers to advertise the party. According to NPR, girls paid 25 cents to get in and boys paid 50 cents. Her older brother Clive, who was 18, played the records. He called himself DJ Kool Herc. What he did with those records is now commonly celebrated as the birth of hip hop. This lesson tells the story of the people who built hip hop in the 1970s and early 1980s, and of the musical ideas they invented.

A neighbourhood makes its own music

Hip hop is a whole culture, not just a kind of music. It grew out of block parties in the Bronx, with influences from African American, Afro-Caribbean and Latino communities. By the 1970s the Bronx had been cut in half by a huge highway, the Cross Bronx Expressway. Building it sped up the departure of white families, and it left lower-income African American, Latin American and Caribbean families living together in the southern half of the borough. Local clubs and radio stations mostly aimed at older listeners, so Bronx teenagers were a ready-made audience for parties like Cindy's.

Hip hop did not appear in a single night. Sources point out that it grew slowly in several places during the 1970s. But the Sedgwick Avenue party was one of its key early moments. In 2007 New York State recognised 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as the birthplace of hip hop, and in 2016 part of the street was renamed Hip Hop Boulevard.

Kool Herc and the break

Clive Campbell was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1955. He moved to the Bronx with his family in 1967, when he was 13. In Jamaica he had heard sound systems: big, loud collections of record players, amplifiers and speakers that played at neighbourhood dances. Their DJs talked rhythmically over the records, a style called toasting. In the Bronx, Herc built his own sound system with two turntables, or record players, and powerful speakers.

Herc played funk and soul records, especially James Brown's. He noticed that dancers went wildest during the break: a short section where the singing and most of the instruments drop out, leaving the drums and percussion to play on their own. A break might last only a few seconds. So Herc used two copies of the same record. As the break finished on one turntable, he started it again on the other. By going back and forth, he could turn a few seconds of drumming into minutes. The table shows the idea:

Herc also switched straight from the break of one record to the break of another. He called these techniques the merry-go-round. The earliest known merry-go-round went from James Brown's Give It Up or Turnit a Loose to Bongo Rock by the Incredible Bongo Band, and then to The Mexican by the English rock band Babe Ruth. DJs such as Grandmaster Flash, whom you will meet below, found the exact start of each break by listening on headphones, so the crowd never heard them searching. If you use headphones yourself, keep the volume at or below about 60 percent.

B-boys, b-girls and the MC

Herc called the dancers who danced to his breaks break-boys and break-girls, or b-boys and b-girls, and their dancing breaking. They formed a circle and took turns in the middle. At first the moves were simple, but soon dancers were spinning on the floor and trying to outdo each other. In the early 1980s the media began to call it breakdancing. Breakers came from many backgrounds: the famous Rock Steady Crew included members from Puerto Rico. In August 2024 breaking became an Olympic sport for the first time, at the Paris Games, where 16 b-boys and 17 b-girls competed in face-to-face battles.

Herc also talked to the crowd over the music, as Jamaican DJs did. He found that Jamaican-style toasting did not catch on with Bronx dancers. So he and his friend Coke La Rock developed a new way of rhyming over the funk breaks. They shouted out friends in the room in funny little rhymes, and the rhymes grew longer and more skilful. The person on the microphone became the MC, short for master of ceremonies: someone who introduces the DJ and keeps the crowd excited, often with call and response, as in Lesson 18. MCs gradually turned their rhymes into rapping: speaking words in a strong rhythm over a beat, usually in rhyme.

Rapping is rhythm, just like the note values in Lesson 2. Here are two lines made up for this lesson. The syllables in capitals land exactly on the beat, and the rhyming words, BEAT and NEAT, both land on beat 4:

Four syllables squeezed into one beat are sixteenth notes (tika-tika). Two syllables in a beat are eighth notes (ti-ti). An eighth note followed by two sixteenths is ti ti-ka, and one syllable that fills the whole beat is a quarter note (ta). Good MCs play with these patterns the way a drummer does.

A scratch in a bedroom, 1975

Other Bronx DJs took Herc's ideas further. One was Theodore Livingston, known as Grand Wizzard Theodore. In his own telling, in 1975, when he was about 12, he was playing records loudly in his bedroom. His mother came to the door and told him to turn the music down. While she was talking, he kept his hand on the record and rubbed it back and forth, and he liked the sound it made. He practised the move and then showed it off at a party.

Theodore is widely credited with inventing scratching: moving a record back and forth under the needle by hand to make a rhythmic sound. Sturdy turntables helped. On the Technics SL-1200, released in 1972, the motor kept turning at the correct speed even when a DJ wiggled the record.

Grandmaster Flash and the Quick Mix Theory

Joseph Saddler, known as Grandmaster Flash, grew up in the Bronx. At Samuel Gompers High School, a vocational school, he learned to repair electronic equipment. Early hip hop DJs often changed records out of time with the beat. Flash borrowed the smooth timing of disco DJs and worked out a precise method that he called the Quick Mix Theory. He used two copies of a record, headphones and a mixer, a box that blends the sound of two turntables, with a sliding control called a crossfader. With them he could cut, repeat and extend a tiny piece of music, perfectly in time.

Flash's backspin was a quick turn of the record back to the start of a break, so he could loop the same phrase again and again. With punch phrasing, he dropped short horn hits from one record over the beat of another. Theodore is credited with inventing scratching, but Flash perfected it and brought it to new audiences. Instead of just playing records, DJs like Flash were now making new music out of them, using the turntable as an instrument.

From parties to records, 1979 to 1981

For its first six years, hip hop lived mostly at live parties. Many early rappers believed the style belonged at live shows, not on records. In 1979 the singer and studio owner Sylvia Robinson and her husband, Joe Robinson, founded Sugar Hill Records in Englewood, New Jersey. Their first hit was Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang, produced by Sylvia Robinson. A studio band played the backing music, copying the bass line of Chic's disco hit Good Times. Chic's songwriters, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, later won songwriting credit.

Rapper's Delight was not quite the first rap record, since the Fatback Band's King Tim III (Personality Jock) came out shortly before it. But it took rap to a huge audience. It reached number 36 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in January 1980 and number one in Canada.

On 14 February 1981, the Bronx group Funky 4 + 1 became the first hip hop group to perform on a national television show, Saturday Night Live. The group was notable for including a woman MC, Sha-Rock (Sharon Green). The same year, Sugar Hill released The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel. Flash made this seven-minute piece live in the studio, cutting, scratching and mixing pieces of other records on turntables. It was the first rap track built from records in this way. Flash later said it took between 10 and 15 takes, and that whenever he made a mistake he went back to the beginning.

The pioneers have since been honoured. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five became the first rap group in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 2007. In 2019 Flash became the first hip hop artist to receive Sweden's Polar Music Prize, and in 2023 Kool Herc entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame too.

Drum machines and samplers

In the 1980s, new machines changed how hip hop beats were made. A drum machine plays drum sounds by itself, in patterns you program. The Japanese company Roland made the TR-808 from 1980 to 1983. It was one of the first drum machines to let users program their own rhythms instead of choosing preset patterns. Its deep, booming bass drum became a cornerstone of hip hop, and it has been used on more hit records than any other drum machine.

A sampler records a short piece of sound and plays it back at the touch of a button. Sampling means reusing a short piece of one recording in a new recording. In the 1980s hip hop producers sampled funk and soul records, especially their drum breaks, so a break could loop without two turntables. In 1986 several hip hop tracks sampled the drum break from James Brown's Funky Drummer (1970), and the Akai MPC sampler of 1988 made looping easier still. The Apache break in the listening guide below has been sampled countless times since the 1980s.

Sampling raises a question of fairness. Clyde Stubblefield, the drummer who played the Funky Drummer break, received no royalties from the many records built on it. Royalties are the payments musicians earn when their work is used. Today, to use a sample legally, an artist needs permission from the copyright owner, a process called clearance. In 1991 a US court ruled that a rapper's sample, used without permission, broke copyright law.

The four elements

Hip hop is often described as having four principal elements, and you have now met them all:

Knowledge is sometimes called a fifth element. A typical early hip hop event was a triple bill of DJ, MC and breakers, with graffiti artists decorating the stage and designing the flyers.

Remember: hip hop began with the DJ and the break, not with rapping. Herc stretched the break, Theodore and Flash turned the turntable into an instrument, MCs rhymed over the beat, and dancers and artists made it a whole culture. Rappers moved to the front later, but the beat built from the break is still at the heart of the music.

Listening guide

• Incredible Bongo Band, Apache (1973): on the official channel of the record label Mr Bongo; just under five minutes. The tune was written by the English songwriter Jerry Lordan and was a 1960 hit for the English instrumental rock group the Shadows. In 1973 the producer Michael Viner and a funk group called the Incredible Bongo Band recorded it in Vancouver, Canada. They added a bongo introduction and much more percussion, and Jim Gordon played the drum break. It was not a hit at first, but its long percussion break was later sampled countless times, and it has been called hip hop's national anthem. Listen for the bongo opening. Then raise your hand each time the tune drops out and only drums and percussion are left: that is a break. Imagine stretching it with two copies.
• Grandmaster Flash, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel (1981): on the official Grandmaster Flash Topic channel; just over seven minutes. Flash built it from pieces of other records, among them Chic's Good Times, Blondie's Rapture, Queen's Another One Bites the Dust, the Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight and Apache itself. Listen for the Good Times bass line, which keeps coming back. Listen for quick cuts from one record to another, for scratches, which make a rhythmic zigzag sound, and for backspins, which sound like sweeps. Notice how even the short pauses come back in exactly on the beat.

If you listen on headphones, keep the volume at or below about 60 percent.

Common misconceptions

• "Hip hop is just another word for rap." Hip hop is a whole culture with four principal elements, and it began with DJs playing breaks. Rapping grew out of the MC's job at those parties.
• "Rappers just talk." Rapping is rhythm. Syllables are placed on beats and on eighth-note and sixteenth-note subdivisions, and rhymes often land on strong beats.
• "DJs just press play." Early hip hop DJs used turntables as instruments. Wheels of Steel took Grandmaster Flash 10 to 15 takes to perform without a mistake.
• "Hip hop was born in one night at one party." The 1973 party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue was a key moment, but hip hop grew slowly in several places in the Bronx through the 1970s.
• "Sampling means you can use any recording you like." Using a sample legally takes permission from its owner, and fair credit for the original musicians matters.

Putting it together

Hip hop began in the Bronx in the 1970s, in a working-class community of African American, Caribbean and Latino families. On 11 August 1973, at a back-to-school party organised by Cindy Campbell at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, her brother DJ Kool Herc, born in Jamaica, played the breaks of funk records. He stretched them with two copies on two turntables and switched from break to break in his merry-go-round. B-boys and b-girls danced to the breaks, and Herc and Coke La Rock rhymed over them, the beginning of the MC and of rapping.

Grand Wizzard Theodore is credited with inventing scratching in 1975, and Grandmaster Flash made DJing precise with his Quick Mix Theory. Sylvia Robinson's Sugar Hill Records put hip hop on record with Rapper's Delight in 1979 and Wheels of Steel in 1981. In the 1980s, drum machines such as the TR-808 and samplers gave producers new ways to build beats. Hip hop's four elements are DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti art, and the break that started it all is still at its heart.

Sources

1. Incredible Bongo Band. (1973). Apache [Audio recording, Pride/MGM]. Mr Bongo, YouTube. youtube.com
2. Grandmaster Flash. (1981). The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel [Audio recording, Sugar Hill]. Grandmaster Flash - Topic, YouTube. youtube.com
3. Lonsdorf, K., Summers, J., and Jarenwattananon, P. (2023, July 11). 50 years ago, a summer party in the Bronx gave birth to hip-hop. NPR. npr.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Hip-hop; DJ Kool Herc; 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel; Grandmaster Flash; Grand Wizzard Theodore; Scratching. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Apache (instrumental); Rapper's Delight; Sugar Hill Records; Funky 4 + 1. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
7. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Sampling (music); Roland TR-808; Breaking at the 2024 Summer Olympics. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

The members of a vocal group called the Dukays used to warm up by singing nonsense syllables in different keys. One day the singer Eugene Dixon changed the syllables to include the name of another member, Earl Edwards. With their songwriting mentor, Bernice Williams, the two turned that warm-up into a song, Duke of Earl. Dixon released it under a new name, Gene Chandler, and in 1962 it went to number one on both the pop and the rhythm and blues charts. Songs often start this small: a catchy phrase, a rhythm or four chords. In this lesson you will write a short song of your own, one step at a time.

Step 1: Choose four chords

Open Music Theory, a free online textbook, points out that four chords are probably the most common in all of pop music: I, IV, V and vi. Roman numerals name chords by the scale step they are built on (Lesson 10), with capitals for major chords and small letters for minor ones. In C major, those four chords are:

Many songs arrange these same four chords into a loop that repeats. Open Music Theory calls these loops schemas and names the most common ones:

Am is short for A minor. Because the loops share the same four chords, they sound alike; the difference is the order. For your song, start with the doo-wop loop: C, Am, F, G, one chord per bar. Say each chord's name on beat 1 of its bar and clap the other three beats, round and round.

Step 2: Find your hook

A hook is a short musical idea that catches the ear and keeps coming back. It is often the song's title, and it usually lives in the chorus. To find yours, pick a title of two to five words about something you know: a place, a pet, a game or a feeling. Say it aloud over and over, and notice its natural rhythm. Which syllables are strong? Tap them. Then sing the title on two or three notes until one version sticks. Duke of Earl shows that even nonsense syllables can become a hook if their rhythm is strong.

Step 3: Write a melody that fits the chords

A melody fits the chords when its most important notes belong to the chord playing underneath. Beats 1 and 3 are the strong beats in 4/4, so aim for chord notes there. On the weaker beats, you can move by step towards the next chord note. These in-between notes are called passing notes. Here are the safe notes for the strong beats in each bar of the loop:

Here is a bare-bones melody that follows the rule, with one note on beat 1 and one on beat 3 of each bar. You can copy it and then change it:

Notice where it ends: on D, over the G chord. That sounds unfinished, like a question, because it stops away from the home note, C. To give an answer, as in Lesson 11, end a later phrase on C over the C chord. A few more tips: move mostly by step and save leaps for important words; keep the whole tune within about an octave so you can sing it comfortably (Lesson 15); and repeat your hook so listeners can learn it.

Step 4: Write your own words

Your words must be your own. Song lyrics are protected by copyright, so even one line copied from a famous song is not yours to use, and copying would hide your own voice anyway. Write about something you know and care about. Then shape the words to fit the music:

• Say each line aloud and find its stressed syllables. Put those syllables on strong beats.
• Give each syllable its own note, or stretch one syllable over two notes.
• End pairs of lines with rhymes or near rhymes. Near rhymes share a vowel sound, like time and mine.
• Let the verses tell the details, and let the chorus sum up the idea with the hook.
• Keep private details, such as your full name, address or school, out of any song you share.

Here is one made-up line, two bars long, with its stressed syllables in capitals on beats 1 and 3:

Each pair of syllables in one beat is two eighth notes (ti-ti), and BUS fills beat 3 as a quarter note (ta).

Step 5: Plan the form

Use verse-chorus form from Lesson 16. Each verse and each chorus can be the four-bar loop played twice, which makes eight bars:

That is 37 bars. In 4/4 at 100 beats per minute, 37 bars take 148 beats, or about a minute and a half. To make the chorus stand out, sing it higher or with longer notes. You can also keep the same four chords but change their order: for example, use Am, F, C, G in the verse and C, Am, F, G in the chorus.

Why this matters: thousands of songs share the same four chords, so the chords alone do not make a song yours. Your hook, your melody, your rhythm and your words do. Knowing the common loops frees you to spend your effort where it counts.

Step 6: Build it in Song Maker

Chrome Music Lab Song Maker is free, runs in a web browser and needs no account. Each square in its grid is one note. When Settings are set to the Major scale starting on middle C, the lowest row is middle C. Counting up from the bottom, the rows are C (1), D (2), E (3), F (4), G (5), A (6) and B (7), then the C above (8), D (9), E (10), F (11), G (12) and A (13). Each beat has two columns, so beat 1 is the first column of a bar and beat 3 is the fifth.

1. Open Song Maker, open Settings, and set the length to 4 bars, the scale to Major and the start note to middle C.
2. Build the chords in the low rows, on beat 1 of each bar. Bar 1, C major: rows 1, 3 and 5 (C, E, G). Bar 2, A minor: rows 1, 3 and 6 (C, E, A). Bar 3, F major: rows 1, 4 and 6 (C, F, A). Bar 4, G major: rows 2, 5 and 7 (D, G, B). Repeat each chord on beat 3 if you like.
3. Press play and set the tempo to about 100.
4. Add the melody in the high rows. For the model tune: bar 1, E (row 10) then G (row 12); bar 2, A (row 13) then E (row 10); bar 3, F (row 11) then A (row 13); bar 4, G (row 12) then D (row 9). Then change it until it sounds like yours.
5. Try the instruments (Marimba, Piano, Strings, Woodwind or Synth) and the drum sounds (Electronic, Blocks, Kit or Conga), and add a beat in the drum rows at the bottom.
6. Press Save. Song Maker gives you a link to your song and can download it as a sound file (WAV). Keep it for Lesson 27, and ask a grown-up before you share the link.

Notice that bars 2, 3 and 4 do not put the root, the note that names the chord, at the bottom. A chord's notes can be stacked in any order and it is still the same chord: A minor is A, C and E whether A is at the bottom or the top. Stacking chords this way keeps them close together, so the change from one chord to the next sounds smooth.

Listening guide

• Gene Chandler, Duke of Earl (1962): on Gene Chandler's official Topic channel; under two and a half minutes. It was written by Chandler, Earl Edwards and Bernice Williams and recorded in Chicago for the Vee-Jay label, with Floyd Morris on piano and Al Duncan on drums. Open Music Theory names it as an example of the doo-wop loop, I-vi-IV-V. Listen for the backing voices and for the chords coming round and round. Can you hear when the loop starts again? Try counting how many beats each chord lasts.
• Coldplay, Viva la Vida (2008): the official video on Coldplay's channel; about four minutes. Open Music Theory explains that it uses the same doo-wop loop, but each phrase starts on IV instead of I: IV-V-I-vi. The track is built around a looping string section, arranged and played by the violinist Davide Rossi, with more layers added as it goes, including a church bell sound in the chorus. Listen for the strings repeating the loop, and notice how new layers make the song grow while the loop keeps turning.

If you listen on headphones, keep the volume at or below about 60 percent.

Common misconceptions

• "You need to play an instrument to write a song." Your voice, a pencil and a free tool like Song Maker are enough. Duke of Earl began as a vocal warm-up.
• "Using the same four chords as another song is copying." Thousands of songs share the I, IV, V and vi chords, as Open Music Theory shows. Your melody, rhythm and words are what make a song yours.
• "Borrowing one line from a famous song is fine." Song lyrics are protected by copyright. Write every word yourself.
• "Every line must rhyme perfectly." Many songs use near rhymes, and some lines do not rhyme at all. What matters most is that the words fit the beat and say what you mean.
• "A real song has to be long." Duke of Earl lasts under two and a half minutes. A short song with a clear hook is a real song.

What you now know

A short song can be built in six steps. First, choose four chords: in C major, I, IV, V and vi are C, F, G and A minor, and Open Music Theory names common loops of them, such as the doo-wop loop I-vi-IV-V heard in Duke of Earl and, starting on IV, in Viva la Vida. Second, find a hook, a short catchy idea, often the title, that keeps coming back. Third, write a melody that puts chord notes on the strong beats 1 and 3, moves mostly by step, and ends on the home note C when you want it to sound finished.

Fourth, write your own words, with stressed syllables on strong beats and rhymes at the ends of lines. Fifth, plan a verse-chorus form: 37 bars at 100 beats per minute last about a minute and a half. Sixth, build it in Song Maker, with the chords in the low rows and the melody in the high rows, and save it for Lesson 27, where you will record it.

Sources

1. Chandler, G. (1961). Duke of Earl [Audio recording, Vee-Jay]. Gene Chandler - Topic, YouTube. youtube.com
2. Coldplay. (2008). Viva la Vida [Official video]. Coldplay, YouTube. youtube.com
3. Hughes, B., and Lavengood, M. (n.d.). Four-chord schemas. In M. Gotham et al., Open Music Theory (Version 2). VIVA Open Publishing. viva.pressbooks.pub
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Duke of Earl; Viva la Vida (song). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Hook (music). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
6. Google Creative Lab. (n.d.). Song Maker [Web application]. Chrome Music Lab. musiclab.chromeexperiments.com

Here is a puzzle. In March 2008, a team of researchers played the oldest known recording of a person singing: a few seconds of the old French folk song Au clair de la lune, recorded on 9 April 1860. They heard what seemed to be a woman or a child singing at an ordinary speed. The next year, the same team found a mistake. The real singer was a man, singing very slowly. How could a recording turn a man into a child? Solving that puzzle, and a few others, will help you record your own song.

A machine that could not play back

The singer was possibly Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French printer and inventor. In 1857 he patented the phonautograph. Its horn collected sound and made a thin sheet, called a diaphragm, vibrate. A stiff bristle attached to the diaphragm traced the vibrations as a wavy line on a hand-cranked cylinder coated in black soot. Scott wanted people to read the wavy lines with their eyes, like writing. His machine could not play sound back at all. Thomas Edison's phonograph, which could play sound back, came 20 years later, in 1877.

In 2008, a group of sound historians and engineers called First Sounds turned Scott's lines into sound, using technology from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. At first they played the 1860 recording at twice its correct speed, because of a misunderstanding about a reference frequency recorded with it. That solves the puzzle.

The pitch of a note depends on its frequency: how many times each second the sound vibrates. Middle C vibrates about 262 times a second, and the C an octave above it about 523 times. Doubling the speed of a recording doubles every frequency, which raises every note by exactly one octave, and it halves the time. So a 20-second recording of a man singing slowly became a 10-second recording that sounded like a woman or child. In 2015, fifty of Scott's recordings and notes were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

The problems you will solve

Recording your song raises problems of its own: choosing a safe tool, getting the level right, keeping out noise, singing along with your backing, saving your work and protecting your ears. Here they are, one at a time, with a fix for each.

Problem 1: Which tool, and is it safe to use?

You need something that records sound, is free and does not ask you to create an account. Two good choices:

Many other music apps and websites need an account, and they often set a minimum age, commonly 13. One reason is a US law, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which places special rules on websites and online services that collect personal information from children under 13. So do not sign up for accounts on your own. Audacity offers an optional cloud service, audio.com, that needs an account. You do not need it, because you can save everything on the computer. If you want to share your song online, do it only with a grown-up's help, and keep personal details such as your full name, school and address out of it.

Problem 2: Too loud or too quiet

Every recorder has a ceiling, the loudest sound it can capture. Recording meters show this ceiling as 0 dB (decibels) at the top, with quieter levels as minus numbers below it. If you sing too loudly or too close to the microphone, the sound hits the ceiling and the tops of the sound waves are cut off flat. This is called clipping. It makes a harsh, crackly distortion that is hard to repair afterwards. In Audacity, you can spot clipping when the meter beside the track goes into the red or the waveform looks like a square block. The fix: turn the microphone down or move a little further away.

The opposite problem is a recording that is too quiet. The meter stays near the bottom and the waveform barely moves. The fix: move closer or turn the microphone up. Audacity's guide says that for normal speaking the ideal level is between -18 and -12 dB, comfortably below the ceiling. Always make a short test recording and listen back before the real take.

Problem 3: Noise and echo

Microphones hear everything: fans, traffic, a dishwasher and the echo of a bare room. Record in the quietest room you can find, close the windows and switch off noisy machines. Soft things such as curtains, carpets, cushions and clothes soak up echoes, so a room full of soft furnishings usually has less echo than a room with hard, bare walls. Many laptops have a built-in microphone, and Audacity's guide says it may be good enough to record your voice properly. Face the microphone and keep the same distance from it for the whole take.

Problem 4: Singing along with your backing

In Lesson 26 you downloaded your Song Maker loop as a WAV file. In Audacity, drag that file into the project window, or use Import in the File menu, and it appears as a track. Now layer your voice on top. Audacity can play the tracks you already have while it records a new one, so each layer can sit on its own track. Wear headphones while you record, so the backing goes into your ears and not into the microphone; otherwise you record the backing twice. Keep the headphone volume at no more than 60 percent of the maximum, as the World Health Organization advises.

Once your voice is recorded, add more layers in the same way: a second voice singing chord notes from Lesson 26, or the body-percussion break from Lesson 25. Each track has a volume slider and a pan slider, which moves its sound from left to right, on its left-hand side. Use them to balance the layers so your voice sits clearly above the backing.

Problem 5: Keeping and sharing your work

Audacity gives you two ways to keep your work. Save Project, in the File menu, stores everything as an .aup3 project file with all your separate tracks, so you can go on editing later. Export Audio, also in the File menu, makes one ordinary sound file, such as an MP3 or a WAV, that a wide variety of programs can open. Do both. Audacity's guide suggests mono files if you are only recording a voice. It also advises keeping projects you are working on on the computer itself, not on a USB stick.

Problem 6: Listening without harming your ears

Recording means a lot of listening, often on headphones. The World Health Organization (WHO) explains that the risk to your hearing depends on both how loud a sound is and how long you hear it. Here are some of its safe listening times per week:

Notice how quickly the safe time shrinks: 80 dB is safe for up to 40 hours a week, but 90 dB for only 4 hours, a tenth as long. These decibels measure how loud a sound is in the air, which is different from the minus numbers on a recording meter. WHO's advice is simple: keep your device's volume to no more than 60 percent of its maximum, use well-fitted headphones, prefer speakers to headphones where you can, and give your ears regular breaks. Ringing in the ears that does not go away is a warning sign, so tell a grown-up, who can arrange a hearing check.

In short: choose a free tool with no account, test your level so the meter stays out of the red, record in a quiet room, layer your voice over the backing with headphones at a safe volume, save the project and export a copy, and share online only with a grown-up.

Listening guide

• Au clair de la lune, phonautogram of 9 April 1860, possibly sung by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, restored by First Sounds: two public-domain versions on Wikimedia Commons. First play the 2008 version, about 11 seconds long, which runs at double speed. Then play the 2009 version, about 21 seconds long, at the corrected speed. Listen for the difference in pitch: the second is an octave lower. Notice how much longer it lasts, and how much hiss and crackle surround the voice. Can you hum the tune once you know it?
• Your own test recording: after you have made it, play it straight after the 1860 voice. What makes yours so much clearer: the microphone, the digital recorder, or the quiet room?

If you listen on headphones, keep the volume at or below about 60 percent.

Common misconceptions

• "The louder the recording, the better." A level that hits the ceiling clips, which causes harsh distortion that is hard to repair. Aim for the middle of the meter, about -18 to -12 dB for normal speech.
• "You need expensive equipment to record a song." Audacity is free, and a laptop's built-in microphone or a phone's recorder can capture a voice well enough to share with your family.
• "Every free app is fine for anyone to use." Many free apps need an account and set a minimum age, often 13. Audacity needs no account and has no age restrictions, but phone apps that claim to be Audacity are not official.
• "Thomas Edison made the first sound recording." Scott was recording sound as wavy lines in the 1850s and 1860s, about 20 years before Edison's phonograph. Edison's machine was the one that could play sound back.
• "If a volume feels comfortable, it is safe for as long as you like." Safe time depends on loudness and time together: WHO allows 40 hours a week at 80 dB, but only 4 hours at 90 dB.

Looking back

The 1860 recording of Au clair de la lune first sounded like a woman or child because it was played at double speed. Doubling the speed doubles every frequency, raising the pitch an octave and halving the time; at the correct speed it is a man, possibly Scott himself, singing slowly. Scott's phonautograph of 1857 drew sound as wavy lines but could not play it back.

To record your own song, use a free tool with no account, such as Audacity, which has no age restrictions, or a phone's built-in recorder, and leave accounts and online sharing to a grown-up. Test your level: if the meter hits the red or the waveform looks like a square block, the sound is clipping, and a normal speaking voice should sit between -18 and -12 dB. Record in a quiet, soft room. Layer your voice over the Song Maker backing on its own track, wearing headphones at no more than 60 percent volume. Save the project, export an MP3 or WAV, and follow WHO's safe listening advice: the louder the sound, the shorter the safe time.

Looking back over the whole course, you started by finding the beat of a stadium song. Since then you have learned to read rhythms and notes, build scales and chords, follow form, hear music from West Africa to Indonesia, and trace the blues, jazz, rock and roll and hip hop to the people who made them. Now you have written and recorded a song of your own.

Sources

1. Scott de Martinville, É.-L. (1860). Au clair de la lune [Phonautogram, restored by First Sounds, May 2009]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
2. Scott de Martinville, É.-L. (1860). Au clair de la lune [Phonautogram, First Sounds restoration of March 2008, played at double speed]. Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Audacity Team. (n.d.). Recording your voice with a microphone. Audacity Support. support.audacityteam.org
5. Audacity Team. (n.d.). Editing audio. Audacity Support. support.audacityteam.org
6. Audacity Team. (n.d.). Saving and exporting projects. Audacity Support. support.audacityteam.org
7. Audacity Team. (n.d.). Desktop privacy policy; Frequently asked questions. Audacity. audacityteam.org
8. World Health Organization. (n.d.). Deafness and hearing loss: Safe listening. who.int
9. Federal Trade Commission. (n.d.). Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). ftc.gov