mike’s music pages

Archive for April, 2009

In this lesson you will learn about tied notes.

We have been discussing note values in 4/4 time. In 4/4 time a whole note gets 4 beats, a half note gets 2 beats, a quarter note gets 1 beat, an eighth note gets 1/2 beat, and a sixteenth note gets 1/4 beat. The people who write the music are composers or arrangers, and being creative types, they don’t want to be limited to the note values that I have listed. They sometimes want to use notes that are 3 beats or 8 beats or 7 beats. They even want to use notes that have durations of 1 and 1/2 beats. How do they do it? Read the rest of this entry »

Have you annoyed your choir director by not watching him or her? Do you bury your eyes in the music and never look up? You may think that you can just feel the beat and sing. Well, for much choral music you must watch the director.

Unlike most popular music that you hear on the radio, most of the choral music that we sing has tempo variations and varying dynamics. The music that you hear on the radio is compressed so that you don’t have to adjust the volume controls during a song. Live music  has a wider dynamic range than recorded music. That is one way that your ears can tell the difference between a recording and a live performance. Read the rest of this entry »

It is Good Friday as I write this, and I feel compelled to share a notable piece of music with you which is traditionally performed on Good Friday. This work, The St. Matthew Passion by J. S. Bach, is to me one of the greatest works of art ever created, and yet it is not art for art’s sake. It is religious art of the highest order. It is a sublime, religious work that has moved even the most militant atheists.

Unlike some works that are performed during Holy Week, this work does not combine the Passion Stories from the different gospels, but instead takes the story from the Gospel According to Matthew, hence the title “St. Matthew Passion.”

I don’t remember the first time that I heard the St. Matthew Passion, but I do remember that I immediately felt that it was one of the most beautiful musical works that I had ever heard. It is beautiful beyond words, and it has density. Read the rest of this entry »

Fig. 1

This is the second lesson in a series about how to read music.

In our first lesson we learned about notes and how to count them. In this lesson you will learn more about notes, rests, and how to count.

What Are Rests?

Rests are periods of silence in music. Just as notes represent a sound of given duration, rests represent silence of a given duration. In the first lesson we learned about different types of notes. Well, for each type of note there is a corresponding type of rest. See Figure 1.

In the first lesson we talked about the time signature of 4/4. The top 4 means 4 beats in a measure, and the bottom 4 means that a quarter note gets one beat. So, in 4/4 time a quarter note gets 1 beat, a half note gets 2 beats, and a whole note gets 4 beats. An eighth note gets 1/2 beat, and a sixteenth note gets 1/4 beat. The equivalent rests are counted simularly.
Read the rest of this entry »