Many people who are not trained in an instrument are amazed by musicians’ ability to read music, but learning how to read music is not as hard as it may seem. Once you know what graphical elements mean, it is simply a matter of reading enough music to increase your speed as well as the familiarity of musical notation.
The musical notes corresponding to the notes on a piano, violin, trumpet or other instrument are organized on what is called a musical ‘stave’ (plural ‘staves’). This is the group of five horizontal lines you see at regularly intervals arranged on a sheet of music. They look a little like telephone cables, with the notes like little birds that sit in between the lines or directly on them.
A symbol which decides the exact pitch each stave represents is called a clef. The treble or G clef is a curling symbol that you will usually see at the start of each top stave in a piano score. This symbol locates the G immediately above middle C on fourth line of the stave, if you count downwards. It is easy to work out what other notes in this range of the instrument are with this point of reference.
In piano music, two staves are bracketed together, signifying the right and the left hand. Notes above middle C are generally written in the treble clef, while the second stave contains the lower notes, and usually contains the ‘bass’ clef. This is the symbol which curls around like an ear, with has two dots on either side of the second line from the top. Just as the center of the G clef places a particular octave of G on a particular line, the two dots of the bass clef place the F immediately below middle C on that line.
From the above, you can see that clefs provide a place to relate other notes to – if you know a note on the line which runs between the two dots in the bass clef is F, then you can easily work out what other notes are in relation to it, once you know how the lines and spaces work. When you are starting out this can all be confusing and it may take you time to find each note on your instrument, but with practice you should be able to find notes without thinking twice.
The length of a note, unlike the pitch of a note, is not determined by its horizontal position on the stave – depending on how a note is drawn, it will have a specific duration. A minim, for example, has a hollow note-head (as opposed to a quarter note which is filled in black), and has twice the duration of a quarter note. The durations of all the different notes and their symbols is one set of information that you need to learn to be able to make sense of a score.
As you can see from the basic explanations given here, there are a lot of small details that you need to learn if you wish to know how to read music, so the best course of action is to purchase a music theory book which will teach you what you need to know to make sense of musical scores.
If you’re serious about wanting to learn how to read music, you can get a FREE Special Report on the topic from Speedy Music Reading