Lets look at some images

of musical notation for

we should say,
at the outset that western music is
the only musical culture that uses
musical notation in a controlling way.
Yes, there's Chinese musical notation and
there is Indian musical notation, but
neither controls the creation and
the performance of
music to the extent that notation does
in the western classical tradition.
So, how did western
musical notation begin,
how did we get from this complex
score here, how did we get to it?
Well, let's look at some slides and
see how this unfolded.
Western musical notation began when
musicians in monasteries around the year
900 Common Era began to create
a graphic image of their music.
They tried to capture and
freeze sound onto paper or
in this case on to parchment.
And, they did so in this fashion.
Notice all the undulations here,
the musical scribes are trying to
represent the high and
low flow of the music by graphic symbols.
They look like worms squiggling
across the page, but
they're called these little
aggregates are called nouns.
Nouns that represented
a collection of pitches.
If the voice produced a high pitch
they wrote a visually higher symbol.
Eventually, these nouns were
separated into individual discreet
pitches called noti, hence our word note.
A symbol for a pitch, but
these notes originally were only
indicators of pitch, not duration.
Eventually, as you can see by both
the left and right hand image here.
Eventually, musicians introduced the
practice of assigning each particular note
a shape to indicate its duration.
The note could have a tail on it,
or a flag, or
it could be filled in,
or it could be open.
It could have a dot after it and so on.
It took several hundred years,
from roughly 1200 to 1600, for
this system of symbols representing
duration to quite literally take shape.
So now,
we understand something of the origins of

these notational symbols in the west,

and they are just symbols of something.
They represent something.
Pitch and duration.
Let's look at how we use them today.
Originally, the beat in music
was carried by this thing.
The open circle, the whole note as
you see on the left of the screen.
Then, as more and more text was added
to the music over the centuries,
the beat fell down to the half
note as the beat carrier.
And today, most music is represented by
the symbol in the middle of the page,
the quarter note as carrying the beat.
The quarter note as beat carrying unit.
Notice here that we have a did
duple division in the music.
Whole note is divided into two halves,
half note into two quarters,
quarter note into two As and so on.
There's also a triple division
which is affected by means of
a dot that adds 50% of
the value to the note.
This makes a half note equal to two,
not three quarter notes,
the dotted quarter equal to three
eighth notes, not just two, and so on.
And, this is how we get
triple meter in music.
We can see how this works
in a patriotic song,
known in the US as My Country Tis of Thee.
Elsewhere, as God Save the King,
or God Save the Queen.
On the top, you see the text beneath it,
horizontal dashes to show duration.
Then, duration appears in
a different way in musical symbols.
Then, the beat is shown by
quarter notes below it.
Again, the quarter notes
represent the beat in most music.
Finally, we see the position of
the quarter note within each measure.
But, we don't want to make
things too complex here.
This should be a course about emotions and
feelings.
We don't have to read musical notation
to feel, and to have emotions.
You don't have to read musical notation
to get a great deal out of music,
to get a great deal out of this course.
Generally speaking, here's all you have to
know whenever you see a musical example.
Musical notation signs placed higher
vertically represent

high sounding pitches.

Lower signs mean lower sounding pitches.
Notation that gets increasingly darker,
more flags on it represents the,
that music is moving faster up and down,
left to right, darker means faster.
I'll play it for you.
[MUSIC]
You can imagine how the reverse of
that operates coming back down.
Voila.
That's all you need to know
about musical notation.
[MUSIC]