Music Basics

Most things I've read on how to read music dive right in and start swimming. If you've never even been in the water, you are lost from the get-go. As I think back to when all that music fol-de-rol was just so much hen scratching on paper, I recall the frustration as I tried to figure out what the paper had to do with the sounds I was to make. In a rehearsal the other day, I heard people talking about roots and fifths and the third degree of the scale. It occurred to me that others must be facing the same frustration that I experienced in high school.

With that as an introduction, please permit me to get to the real basics of the matter. To start off, look at any one of the songs you are learning. What you can pronounce is called "words." All the rest is "music." Now music comes in many pieces. Let's just identify a few of them.

There are two sets of five lines. These will usually be found above and below the "words." (Remember now, you identified those things in the last paragraph.) The staff above the words is considered to belong to the tenors and leads, while the lower one is the domain of baris and basses. Don't worry about what each of your five lines and the four spaces between mean for the time being. That's advanced stuff. For this month's lesson, we'll be tackling "notes."

Notes have several functions. One of them is the length of time they are to be sung. In normal music, this is easy to describe. (Barbershop takes some liberties. That's also advanced stuff. Ignore it for the time being.) The importance of notes can be likened to the importance of people, for the most part. You may have noticed that the more people "fluff" themselves up, the less important they really are. In music, it's very similar. The most important note (that is, the one that is held the longest,) has the least "fluffiness" to it. This is what is called a whole note. It's easy to recognize, because it consists of just a hole. It looks like an open oval. As things get added, the note becomes less important. These "things" take four forms; sticks, flags, triplets and dots. (Oops, the dot and triplets are exceptions to the Wheatley Importance Rule [WIR]. We'll get to the dots later in this article and the triplets in another one.)

If you are one of those who like to attach rules to things, here's the WIR. Anytime something is done to a note, that note becomes half as important as it was before. You got that, now? The first thing they do to the beautiful whole note is to add a stick to it. Whether the stick points up or down doesn't matter for its importance. We have just gone from a whole note to a half note.

The next thing they do is to fill in the hole of the whole note. Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. They never take anything away, so the stick remains in place. This action will give you a filled-in oval with a stick attached to it. We've now done two things to the whole note and reduced it to a quarter note.

From here on, the only thing you have to worry about are flags or curly-cues at the end of the stick that is away from our magnificent oval. A note with one flag attached becomes an eighth note while one with two flags is called a sixteenth note. In theory, this can go on forever, but from a barbershop standpoint, it's about as far as we go.

Let's look at an exception to the WIR, which is the dot. You know that a dot means you've come to the end of the thought or process. Music people don't believe that. To confuse us, they steal our beloved dot, and use it wherever they want to. Actually, it is a shorthand way of saying, "You know that note you just looked at. Well, hold it half again as long as you would have without the dot." Thus, a quarter note with a dot after it becomes a 3/8 note. Sometimes they get too fancy for their britches and add a second dot. Now the note becomes a 7/16 note. Ain't that the cat's meow!

We'll, we've covered just about enough for one session. Take time to look at various pieces of music and see if you can describe about how long each note should be held. Now that you've done that, you may have figured out that nobody told you how long to hold a whole note. In fact, that's variable, and we'll get into that another time. Right now, just pick a convenient length of time and work from there.