Reading Music Lesson 2: Pitches and Staves

It's time now to move onto the second skill required for reading music: pitches.

Pitches

The pitch of a note is the "music" part of it—it's the actual sound produced when you press a key on a piano or pluck a string on a guitar. In Western English-language music, we refer to pitches by letters of the alphabet (Sorry, Sound of Music fans...you'll need to go somewhere francophone if you want to use Do-Re-Mi!).

There are seven "main" pitches, going from A to G; you keep looping and looping for eternity, so that the note after G is A. With younger students (who have a more...shaky grasp of the alphabet), I'll write two sets of the musical alphabet at the top of their page...

A B C D E F G A B C D E F G

...so it's easier to see why two notes after F is an A, and not an "H".

On a piano keyboard, every white key is one of these letters. There are also some in-between pitches (represented on the piano by the black keys), which we refer to using the terms sharp or flat, so that the black key between A and B could be called either "A sharp" or "B flat". For now, though, we're just going to work with the white keys and those main letter names.

Staves

(Q: What does "Staves" mean? A: It's the plural form of the word "Staff")

A little bit of history...

"In ancient times, notation consisted of only a single line with squiggles above and blow it to represent different pitches. We don't understand exactly what these squiggles meant, but we know they gave only approximate pitches and were not very accurate. Over time, notation became more exact, and for the music of the early Christian church (about 600 AD) musicians began using a staff of four lines. Pitches were shown more accurately using square notes on the lines and in the spaces.

As instruments improved and could play more high notes and more low notes, more lines were added to the staff. Today, our staff can has as few lines or as many as we need, though the standard size is usually eleven lines. This is called the Great (or Grand) Staff.

[...] This staff has so many lines that it is very hard to tell which note is which. So to make it easier on our eyes, we don't draw the middle line; it stays invisible. This invisible middle line separates the Great Staff into two smaller staves; one of five lines above the middle line and one of five lines below the middle line." †

A piece of music tells you which pitch it would like you to play using a system of lines and spaces that we call a staff. To know which pitches belong to which line or space, there will be a symbol called a clef at the beginning of every line. In piano, we use two staves (five lines each) with two different clefs:

? The treble clef is usually on the upper staff, and ? The bass clef is usually on the lower staff.

We'll work with the treble clef first.

†: taken from "Conservatory Canada Theory 1" by Steven Fielder & D.F. Cook © 2002 Waterloo Music and © 2014 Conservatory Canada, ISBN 978-0-88909-225-9

Next up

Previous

Note Equations