[MUSIC] Let's look at some images of musical notation. But we should say at the outset that Western music is the only musical culture that uses musical notation in a controlling way. Yes, there is Chinese musical notation, and there is Indian musical notation. But neither controls the creation and 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 onto 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 neumes, neumes that represented a collection of pitches. If the voice produced a high pitch, they wrote a visually higher symbol. Eventually, these neumes were separated into individual discrete pitches called notae, 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 note a particular note shape to indicate its duration. The note could have tail on it or a flag, or 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 texts 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 duple division in the music. Whole note is divided into two halves, half note into two quarters, quarter note into two eighths, 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. You 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 with more flags on it represents that 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]
