Hello and welcome in these troubled times.
I normally teach piano face to face, but now I have fewer online lessons so I have more free time on my hands so I thought I should turn my hand to writing about understanding music - hence quaver not quiver.
There is a tendency to divorce music 'theory' from music itself, perhaps because it can be examined separately. What I am hoping to explore is what the written score tells us.
Below is an extract from a Mendelssohn piano solo piece and it looks pretty complicated. As well as showing the notes on the 'grand stave' it features many dots, some on top of a note, some to the side. The notes are joined together by lines, sometimes two lines. What do the lines and dots mean?
What about this one?
Again there are lines but no dots, just a series of letters sitting on the various lines. After six months of trying I can just about understand and play this.
Of course there are other ways of writing music for handing down to others.
As music progressed from what might be described as an oral tradition (do you remember learning Twinkle Twinkle Little Star from a manuscript?) to a stage when it was preserved for future performance and posterity there developed a vocabulary of how that music should be performed. This might loosely be described as music theory.
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