mike’s music pages

Posts Tagged ‘music theory’

In your music you will often see various markings and abbreviations. Some of these markings are “dynamics” markings and are used by the composer or arranger to indicate the relative loudness or softness desired in the music. See the table below for the more common abbreviations and their meanings.

Note that these are relative terms. The director will guide you in setting the correct volume level, but your knowing what these abbreviations mean will be helpful to you and the choir.

Dynamic markings are part of larger set of markings called “expression markings” that are used to indicate how music should be performed. I will address other expression markings in another post.

In an earlier lesson we learned about simple repeats. In this lesson you will learn about the following repeat instructions:

• Da Capo or D.C.: Repeat from the beginning
• Da Capo al Fine or D.C. al Fine: Go back to beginning and sing to Fine
• Dal Segno or D.S.: Repeat from the sign
• Dal Segno al Fine or D.S. al Fine: Go back to the sign and sing to Fine

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In previous lessons we have discussed only 4/4 time. You learned that in 4/4 time there are 4 beats to a measure and a quarter note gets 1 beat. You learned that a measure is the space between two bar lines, so if there are 4 beats to a measure there must be notes and rests between the bar lines that add up to 4 beats.

Fig. 1

You learned that 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. You also learned that there are rests that correspond to each note value: whole rests, half rests, quarter rests, eighth rests and sixteenth rests.

In this post you will learn about some other time signatures and how to count them. Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous lesson we discussed tied notes. Tied notes are a way for us to add notes together, allowing us to extend the sound of notes. In this lesson we will learn about another method of extending notes by using dot notation.

We use dot notation to extend the length of notes.

When we want to extend the length of a note, we can place a “dot” after the note to extend it. The dot increases the length of the note by one-half. This means that if you place a dot after a half note which gets two beats, then the dot adds 1 beat to the note so that a dotted half note gets 3 beats.

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They Told Me That I Was Singing An Octave Too Low.  What is an octave?

Sometimes in our rehearsals there is a bass singer who is singing an octave lower than the other basses. When the director says that someone is singing an octave too low, it makes no difference because the offending bass does not know what an octave is. In this lesson you will learn what an octave is and hear some examples.

Many basses think that to sing bass means always to sing low. They don’t think that they are singing bass if they are not rumbling at the bottom of their vocal range. Bass is the lowest voice, but the top of the bass range overlaps the other voices and therefore some bass notes are not very low. If your choir director has told you that you are singing an octave too low, then you need to keep reading. Read the rest of this entry »