Hi everyone. We're going to get started with our elements of music in this week's lesson. There are seven of them, but four of them will get you started in most music classes, so let's get going. You can read them here. We're going to talk about rhythm first.
Rhythm is the duration of sound, how long or how short the notes we sing or play are. And it has to have three parts. It has to have a beat, it has to have a tempo.
Tempo is speed of music, and it has to have meter. What are we counting? Is it 2?
Is it 3? Is it 4? Is it 8? Now, a lot of people will say, oh my goodness, I love the beat of that song. I think you mean you love the rhythm.
Because the beat is just the pulse. It's the rhythmic unit of time. It's just the pulse.
Think about your heartbeat. Your heartbeat can go slow or fast, but it's steady, right? It's a steady beat. That's your heartbeat.
That's the beat of music, too. Same thing. That beat is steady.
It's fast, it's slow, but it's steady. And if it's skipping, something's wrong. Go check with the cardiologist in the case of your heart.
But something is up if it's skipping beats. Okay. Rhythm. Duration of sound.
How long or how short. So here's a beat. Here's rhythm.
That's rhythm. Okay. There's a difference. And we're going to keep going. We're going to talk about melody.
the formal definition of melody is an organized sequence of pitches. It's just the tune of the song y'all. Relax.
It's the tune of the song. It's what we play. It's what we sing.
Okay? And you guys know this. Now melody comes in two different forms.
They come in conjunct and disjunct. Conjunct melodies are pretty simple to sing melodies. Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. Disjunct.
There's a place for us. Somewhere, a place for us, there's a hard leap. Hard leap, not that easy to sing, but it's not impossible.
So conjunct is singable. Stepwise, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. We're going up the steps.
Disjunct, we're leaping all around and everywhere, but we're still singing one line of music. Hey, with melody, you have to have harmony. Harmony is a combination of two or more pitches. You have to have two or more pitches to create a harmony. There's two different types of harmony.
There is consonant harmony and dissonant harmony. Consonant harmony is going to sound pretty easy on your ear. Dissonant harmony is going to sound jarring, cringing, and there's beautiful dissonance and beautiful consonance, beautiful dissonance, not so beautiful in both places.
All right, we're going to... Keep going in part two. So as I was saying, consonant harmony is going to sound pleasing to your ear. Dissonant, not so pleasing to your ear. Dissonant harmonies are going to sound like there's something missing.
And it's not going to sound ugly, not going to sound super pretty either. But again, there's beauty in both and you need both. And we're going to keep going. Dynamics is the volume, how loud or how soft sound is. We have Italian terms in music for many, many things.
And so for volume or dynamics, we have four different levels. Piano means soft. Forte means loud. Mezzo is medium.
So we have piano, which is soft. Mezzo piano, which is very soft. Mezzo forte, very loud.
And forte, loud. If you're a parent, have fun telling your kids that you want them to be piano. Piano, kids.
Piano. piano, you know, they'll get a kick out of that. Normally in music you will see them and they will look like this in symbols. Okay, all right, moving on.
Texture is how we interweave lines with harmonies in music and there are a few that I want to highlight right now. Okay, I want to highlight monophony which is a single line, one voice. with no accompaniment. That means there's no piano under them.
So it may be a singer singing by themselves. It may be a trumpet player playing by themselves, a violin player just playing by themselves. One single line of music. Okay.
The other one I want to highlight is polyphony and it's many voices based on one thing. So it's basically a voice and another voice and they're clashing lines. They're different lines, but they're going to sound really cool.
Next week, when we start getting into some early music, we'll listen to different examples of polyphony. And then imitation. One voice has the melody.
And then... All the other voices that come in, and again, you have to have at least two to create harmony. All the other voices are going to be restated.
Okay, so it's going to come in and come in and we'll listen to different examples of that. It's very common in polyphony. And again, we'll talk about that.
All right, part three is up next and that'll be our last part. All right. When we talk about form, form is just how we organize our music.
Okay. What's different about them? The basic elements in our form is repetition, contrast, and variation. So let's look at different types of form.
And again, I'm going to highlight a few and then others we will talk about as we go. All right. So we're going to talk about strophic form next week.
I will highlight that more next week. Binary form. This is...
your basic two-part form. It is in main section and A section. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.
That's the A section. The B section. Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.
So it's two different sections of music, okay? And then ternary form. It's what it sounds like. A section.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star. how I wonder what you are. B section, up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. A section, it's the main section, repeat it.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. That's it. Those are the two main types of form that we really get into.
The other one I wanted to get into was a motif. A motif is just a real small... fragment of music. Think about just iconic little blips of music that you hear in different songs. And it's that one thing that gets kind of stuck in your head and you can't get it out.
It's that like earworm piece because it's just repetitive over and over and over again. That's what that is. So with a motif comes a sequence and it's motifs repeated at different pitch levels and different things. So you hear it multiple times within a song. All right.
And then Um, the last three types of form that I really wanted to get into is call and response. Okay. This is for my churchy people. Okay. So if you're churchy, vacation, Bible school, summer camp, maybe, um, I'm going to do this and I hope someone will, will do the response.
Ready? Here's the call. Hallelujah.
Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
And when I point to you, I hope somebody is standing at their computer going. Praise ye the Lord. I really hope somebody is doing that with me because that just, that, that will something in my spirit and I just, I have to do that. Okay. So call and response.
That's what a call and response is. And we're going to talk more about that. It's going to be in a lot of the music that we listen to. It's very, very common.
It's a very common form. The next type is improvisation. It's spontaneous music making.
We're making it up as we go. And then finally. an ostinato. An ostinato is a pattern that repeats. It can be harmonic, rhythmic, or melodic.
Okay, so I'm going to give you a prime example of a rhythmic ostinato that everybody knows. Okay, Queen, We Will Rock You, the rhythm, very common ostinato. And then just timbre is basically the difference between the sound quality of instruments and voices.
What makes a trumpet different than a piano? What makes a higher voice different from a lower voice? Okay, it's just a striking difference between voices. Now I encourage you to put all questions in the chat in the comments. I will answer as many of them as I can and I will be posting your discussion.
I look forward to hearing from you. And if you have any questions, DM me, send me an email. Have a great day.
Thanks, Hillman.