Patterns |

By: Aaron Zimmerman

You turn on the TV. You see 20 or so people dressed in bright colors and helmets. They are just standing around, and then suddenly they run full force into each other. One person runs as fast as they can and another person throws him an oblong ball. The receiver catches it and runs a little ways before flinging the ball at the ground and starting to dance.

To the average American adult, this is not such an odd sight, but imagine if you had never seen a football game. How much more do you appreciate the game after learning the rules, understanding the objectives, and appreciating the strategy?

This is what it is like to learn harmony. Harmony is the language of music, learning even a little will change the way you listen to music forever.

The three building blocks of harmony are intervals, scales, and chords.

Intervals

Intervals

An interval is a name for the distance between two notes. Starting from a C, a ‘minor second’ or ‘half step’ takes you to the note directly to the left (B) or right (C#) A whole step would be two half steps, so a D or a Bb.

Scales

C Major Scale

A scale is a pattern of whole steps and half steps. The most common scale, “major”, is the pattern, w,w,h,w,w,w,h. This pattern can be started on any note to create the “major” scale for that note. The vast majority of melodic material in music comes from a single scale. A composer selecting a scale is like an artist picking out the colors of paint they will use for their next work.

Chords

C Major Chord

A chord is three notes played simultaneously. Chords are named for their lowest note (called the “root”), and the scale from which the other notes come from. A “C Major” chord starts on the note C and uses thirds from the major scale. (A third is the interval that you get by skipping one note of the scale.)

Harmony

Now comes the clever bit.

We can take the C Major scale and build a chord for each note, sticking with the same collection of notes (the C Major scale itself), for each root note. This results in the following 7 chords:

By convention, we label these chords with Roman Numerals (numbers are used for so many things in music, this helps distinguish those that designate harmony). We also give them impressing sounding names so we can sound smart at dinner parties. The I chord is called Tonic, the IV chord the Subdominant, and the V chord Dominant.

Harmony is a pattern of chords, a “chord progression”. Usually, chord progressions are designed to create a feeling of departure and return. Think of it like running the bases, we move away from home plate, touching on other chords, before returning home to the I chord, the Tonic.

Sample Chord Progressions:

Pop Music is full of the chord progression I, V, vi, IV.

Pachelbels “Canon in D” uses a longer chord progression: I, V, vi, iii, IV, I, IV, V.

“Hang On Sloopy” and “Wild Thing” both follow I, IV, V, IV…. for the whole song.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony “Ode To Joy” melody alternates mostly between I and V (with a few harmonic flourishes here and there). For the last twenty seconds of the piece, Beethoven repeats and repeats the I chord. This gives the piece a strong sense of finality, of completeness. It is how you can tell that the piece is over.

(Jump to 4:52 to see what I mean about the ending.)

And that’s most of it. Bam! You are now a functional harmony expert. Well, not quite, there are many more exciting twists and turns, but this is a great start. Harmony is the language of music, learning to recognize it is like learning to read. An entire world of appreciation and discovery awaits.

By: Aaron Zimmerman

What is Music Reading?

As in any language, fluency requires not only the ability to speak, but the ability to read and write. Music reading is very similar to reading any other written language. It has small elements that are put together to create larger elements. In spoken languages, we put together letters to form words, and words to form sentences, and sentences to form stories. In music, we start with notes, put them together to form intervals, and then put intervals together to form phrases, etc.

When learning to read, we first learn to recognize letters, then we learn common groupings of those letters over years of practice. Recognizing letters alone is not reading, one must recognize words, and understand how the words are put together to form coherent thoughts. In music, we must learn to recognize notes, and then learn how those notes are put together to form intervals, and finally, how intervals are used to form coherent musical ideas.

Note By Agonizing Note

Most young students learn music from a combination of memory and note spelling. The teacher plays the piece when it is introduced, and later, at home, he plunks it out until he can recreate approximately how it sounded. At the next lesson, minor mistakes are corrected. This technique is supplemented with various mnemonics for identifying notes on the staff, such as Every Good Boy Does Fine (where the first letters are the note names of the lines on the treble staff), or FACE, (the spaces of the treble staff), etc.

The problem with this strategy is that it does not scale to more advanced music. When a student is learning beginner pieces, with one note sounding at a time, (mostly quarter notes and half notes), they can get away with playing by ear, because there isn’t much to remember. But as the pieces get harder, it will be impossible to remember and they will have to fall back to the only other skill they know, note spelling. This works, but it is agonizingly slow to go through a piece note by note, and this frustration is a big reason intermediate students end up quitting. Imagine reading a book letter by letter, not only is it non-sensical (a letter doesn’t “mean” anything), it is impractical for a book of any significant length.

Patterns

The human brain is incredibly good at finding patterns. We cannot help but group things, seeing larger scale object rather than the aspects that create them. When reading a book, we perceive a word, not letters. Rather than windows, wheels, and a metal frame, we perceive a car. Rather than seeing a football defense move as individuals, a quarterback perceives a zone blitz. Operating on a higher level lets us process much more information than we could at a lower level.

How music is read

To read music, students have to learn to see the patterns that pitches create.

Level 1 – Note Names

Level 1 is identifying notes on the staff. Initially this is done by learning specific landmarks. The treble clef circles around “Treble G”. The dots of the bass clef enclose “Bass F”, and the first ledger line above the bass staff, or below the Treble staff is “middle C”. As the student progresses they will pick up the names of all of the notes. If they have trouble with this, flashcards or mnemonics are very useful.

Level 2 – Intervals

Level 2 is quickly identifying the distance between two notes, the “interval”. These intervals are given names, based on how many steps of the scale away the notes are. I have my students write an arrow with a number next to it between every pair of notes in their music when they are starting out on the staff. Sometimes I even introduce a piece of music by giving them a starting note and then verbally instructing them “Third up, step down, step down”, etc.

Level 3 – Patterns

Level 3 is identifying larger scale patterns. There are many types of such patterns (just as there are many sentence structures, many grammatical rules one has to learn when learning English or any other language). The most useful to work on identifying are things like chord progressions, scales, accompaniment patterns.

Read music like a book

The world of music is so much richer, so much wider, and so much more satisfying with the ability to read music. One adult student described it as follows:

Before I could read music, playing the piano was like snorkeling in lake Michigan. Now, it is like scuba diving the great barrier reef!

photo credit: djwtwo via photopin cc

Tag Archives: Patterns

FUNctional Harmony

Read Music like a Book

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