MUS 10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Musical Form, Homophony, Folk Music
MUS10 Lecture 3 – Music Theory
Music Theory
• Composition and preservation
o Composition: arranging pitches or sounds in some artful way that makes sense
▪ Pitch properties
• Duration creates rhythms
• Intensity indicates volume (loud, soft)
• Timbre
• Nuance indicates articulations, how notes should be played
o Preservation
▪ Oral tradition
• Includes teaching someone else the song to be passed along
• Folk music and music of older times often passed down orally
• Problems included finding someone interested and song getting
changed as passed down, rarely preserves original form
o Musicians put their own touch on the music
▪ Notational system (written music or scores)
• Different clefs that represent different ranges of pitches
o Treble and bass are the main clefs, but there are also alto
and tenor clefs
• Scales generally have seven pitches with the eight note the same
as the first (except for the chromatic scale)
o Chromatic scale has 12 pitches for each octave
▪ Dots on or between the lines represent pitches
▪ Scale can start on any chromatic pitch
▪ Contain sharps (move up one half step) and flats
(move down one half step)
• Major scales consist of whole and half step patterns (half steps
between third and fourth pitch and seventh and eighth pitch)
o WWHWWWH
• Minor scales have half steps between the second and third pitch
and fifth and sixth pitch
o WHWWHWW
• Modulation means changing from one key to another
o 12 major keys and 12 minor keys (one for each half step
within an octave)
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