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Did you sleep through Music Appreciation 101? Not to worry. Here’s the quickie version. Scott Draycoe made “A’s” in all of his music classes, by the way.
Pitch: how low can you go?
Pitch in music is the “highness” or “lowness” of sound, which is not an upstairs, downstairs kind of thing, but rather a scientific measurement of sound waves. Most music compositions use pitches which range from approximately 16 to over 4,000 vibrations per second. The actual number of cycles per second an adult hears with any given music pitch goes much higher, to around 16,000 cycles per second, thanks to a series of overtones. Overtones occur because most pitches are not “pure” tones. The vibrating of the sound waves causes composite tones to “stack up” above the basic fundamental pitch at exact multiples of the basic pitch's frequency. So when you strike a key on a piano, not one but several tones are actually produced. Every musical sound we hear is a combination of these tones. The only way to produce a pure tone is with a tuning fork or an electronic instrument.
(Here comes a teensie bit of math. You won’t be tested, though.) The A above middle C represents 440 vibrations, or cycles, per second. The next A on the keyboard represents 880 cycles per second, or a 2:1 ratio. That interval between the two A's is called an octave. Octaves can be further divided into other mathematical ratios resulting in intervals called a third, a fifth, and so on.
Most instruments have a limited capacity to alter the pitch of a tone in performance, exceptions being stringed instruments, trombones, and the human voice. A performer's production of a proper pitch is known as "intonation." A singer singing off-key or a violinist playing out of tune is said to have "poor intonation." Producing proper intonation comes a little from practice and a little from having sensitive ears. Some people have what is called "perfect pitch," a fairly rare condition where they can identify notes and pitches simply by hearing, without looking at a sheet of music. It can seem like magic, and although it is a real phenomenon, no one knows exactly how the process works.
Key: opens musical doors
A key is basically a common tonal center around which pitches are organized. This is achieved through the use of scales. A scale can be built on any note and consists of eight ascending notes in order. In addition to the whites notes on a keyboard, a keyboard also contains black notes, which are called "sharp" if they're to the right of a white note or "flat" if they're to the left of a white note. One black key can have two names: F# (f-sharp) or Gb (g-flat (note that “flat” is written as a “b”).
A key is named according to how which note it begins on and how many sharps or flats it has, with "C major" being the exception, since it doesn’t have any sharps or flats. At the very beginning of most music scores you'll see a staff of lines with flats (b's) or sharps (#'s) to indicate the key for that particular piece of music. Compositions can often change keys before they've run their course. Some contemporary works don't even list a key because the tonal center is intentionally not well-defined. When a concert program says that a piece is in "B" or "Db", it's referring to the key.
Melody: can you name that tune?
Melody and tune are fairly interchangeable terms. A melody is simply a series of pitches sounded one after the other in a meaningful and organized way, usually designed by a composer to be aesthetically pleasing to the ear and are often "hummable." Melodies are very common in popular music — "Happy Birthday" is probably the most familiar one. Longer compositions are often based on a single melody, although they may also contain several smaller melodies which are then developed in interesting ways. When the melody becomes the basis for an entire composition it's called a "theme" and doesn't have to necessarily be tuneful or lengthy: everyone is familiar with the first three notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (dah dah dah DUM--three G's and an E-flat). That three-note theme is not much on its own, but what's remarkable is the way Beethoven takes it and runs.
A melody can be slowed down in a later repetition (called augmentation) or speeded up (diminution). It can be turned upside down (inversion) or backwards (retrograde) or even upside and backwards (retrograde inversion). It can be chopped up into little segments and sprinkled throughout a piece or it can change from major to minor in key. The possibilities are only limited by the composer's imagination.
Counterpoint: two is better than one
Counterpoint is the combining of two or more melodic lines simultaneously, whether they are identical or different. Although basically the same thing, counterpoint written before 1600 is known as polyphony. Many composers from about 900 AD used this technique, although Johann Sebastian Bach is generally considered the master. The most complex form of counterpoint is known as a fugue (with Bach’s Art of the Fugue the best known collection), but you might be more familiar with other forms, such as a round (“Row, Row, Row your Boat”) or canon.
Harmony: striking the right chord
Harmony is combining notes together to form chords. Think of harmony as vertical music, whereas melody is horizontal. In the Middles Ages, a chord consisted of two notes, but by the Renaissance three notes (a triad) became the norm. In the twentieth-century, chords could have many different notes.
Rhythm: fascinating!
Rhythm is the organization of the pulses or beats which move music through time. Beats are grouped into measures, separated by bars on a music score, and measures often make up larger musical phrases.
Tempo: your pace or mine?
Whereas rhythm is the “boom ka ching” underlying music’s march through time, tempo is how fast the march takes place. Composers started indicating a tempo on a score extensively during the 17th century, and since most of the important composers of that era were Italian, many tempo markings even today are in Italian, such as largo (slow) or allegro (“fast”). Beethoven was the first composer to use metronome markings to indicate how fast a piece should go, seeing as how the metronome (a mechanical device that emits regular pulses) had just been invented.
Dynamics: can you turn that down a bit?
This is an easy one. Dynamics are the loudness of music, from quiet to loud. Most of these are in Italian (see tempo above), such as “p” for piano (“soft”) or “f” for forte (“loud”). You can stack these up all day, such as pp for pianissimo for really soft or ff for fortissimo. How about really loud? Try fff for fortississimo. After awhile, trying to sound out the “issies” gets a little silly, so don’t try it at home. Most composers stop with 2 or 3, although Tchaikovsky used pppppp and ffff in his “Pathétique” symphony.
Timbre: painting with sound
Timbre is the “quality” of a note, or its color. It’s what helps you distinguish a trombone from a violin, even if playing the same pitch. There are various physics terms that help explain the concept a little bit better, but we won’t get into that here.
Form: what am I?
Form is the structure or some might say architecture of a work. It can mean either a generic term of the piece, like symphony or concerto, or it can mean how a piece is put together, such as sonata form (main theme, a development section, and a recapitulation) or rondo (one principal subject stated at least three times in the same key separated by subordinate themes in-between, ABABA, e.g.).
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