Batsford Book of Music for Children E-Book

Becky Rumens-Syratt

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 145

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A hugely enjoyable way for young children to learn about music. Following on from our successful Chess for Children, music teacher Becky Rumens-Syratt takes young children (aged 6 to 12) on a journey to understand the basics of music, and then specifically how to start to play some of the key instruments: piano, guitar, and recorder. With the help of Trudi Treble and Barry Bass, you can teach children the language of music, the clefs, the stave, the notes and rhythm, with great games along the way, such as making your own edible stave and notes with strawberry laces and smarties or M&Ms. It gives detailed advice such as how to hold a recorder properly for very young children to using a chocolatey finger to learn how to blow into the instrument. It features the same style of illustration as Chess for Children and the same fun elements to make teaching your child about music as enjoyable as it should be.

Leseprobe

Contents

1 Reading Music

Music as a language

The stave

Clefs

Notes

Scales

Key

Harmony

Rhythms

The elements of music

2 Musical Instruments

Woodwind

Brass

Strings

Percussion

Keys

Voice

3 Musical Ensembles

Large ensembles

Small ensembles

4 Learn to Play!

Recorder

Piano

Guitar

5 Types of Music

Classical

Jazz

Pop and rock

Folk and world

Glossary

Index

1 READING MUSIC

Reading music is a very useful skill for any musician. Symbols and lines and dots all come together when we know how to interpret them and we can turn them into beautiful sounds on the spot. Also, if you can read music you can learn how to write music so you can capture your tunes and ideas forever and pass them on to other people to play! When you were younger you learnt to read letters and words and it was hard at first, but here you are, reading this book! With practice we can learn to understand our musical ‘words’ and ‘sentences’ too.

Music as a language

Music is great! Wherever we are in the world, we will have heard some sort of music and many of us have sung along with a favourite song or tapped out a rhythm with our hands and feet. People sometimes call music a ‘universal language’, because even people who don’t speak the same language can make music together.

However old you are, you can enjoy music by listening to it, singing, or playing an instrument. Playing instruments together in a group helps us to make friends and teaches us about working with other people. As well as being fun, playing and singing exercises our muscles and our brain.

Learning music can help us in lots of other areas, too. It makes us better at reading and writing, because we learn music through reading its symbols. We have to count the beats and rhythms in music, and this helps us with mental maths. The way sound is made and heard is all to do with air vibrations and waves: we are studying science without even realizing it. If we start performing music to an audience, it helps us become more confident in everyday life.

Italian words

Italian words are used to describe the way music should be played. Use an app or the Internet to find the meaning of these Italian words:

lento

vivace

forte

rallentando

canto

Can you find any more?

So how do we start to learn about music? Music has its own special words to describe musical things. But don’t worry: we’ll be explaining these as we go, and you can also look them up in the glossary. Musicians will often say things that don’t make sense to other people such as, ‘Let’s take it from the head!’ They’re not talking about real heads! They mean the beginning of the main tune or chorus of a song.

As well as words, musical symbols tell musicians what to do. Music is written down using signs and symbols – just like letters and lines make sentences and paragraphs. Some symbols are called notes. Each note stands for a different sound. Other symbols explain how to play the notes. Most musicians learn how to read music symbols, so when someone gives them a new song they can play it straight away! We call the skill of looking at music symbols and being able to create the sounds they stand for ‘sight-reading’.

The stave

When we look at a sheet of music, the symbols and notes are written on a stave. The stave is a set of five lines for placing musical ideas on. We can follow these lines like a train track, from the beginning of the music piece to the end. The stave is split up into even sections called bars, which act as signposts to where we are in the music, like signal posts along a train track. We will learn more about bars later.

Did you know?

You can buy books ruled with music staves, instead of lines, to write music on. We call this manuscript paper. Find it in a stationery shop and buy some to practise writing music on.

Clefs

Trudi Treble and Barry Bass are the squiggly musical symbols called clefs. A clef tells us how high or low the music is going to sound. It appears on the stave.

In music we use a series of words to describe whether things sound high or low:

In earlier times, people used a different clef for every one of these words, but that was confusing. Now we mainly use two – treble and bass (like Trudi and Barry!) – for high and low. Music for some instruments still uses the alto clef or tenor clef.

All notes are named after letters in the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G. One very special note is called middle C. It is roughly in the middle of a piano’s keyboard and is easy for most people to sing and for most instruments to play. We will learn about other notes later.

Middle C sounds exactly the same whichever clef it is in. It sounds the same but looks different on the stave for each clef. This also means we sometimes call the alto and tenor clefs the C clefs.

In the treble clef, middle C sits on its own little line below the stave. In the bass clef, it sits on its own little line above the stave. On a printed sheet of music, the treble clef is placed above the bass clef. As middle C is the same sound in both clefs, we can imagine that the middle C line is an extra train track running alongside the bass and treble clefs, and this is where the notes cross over.

Some instruments have a really wide range, which means that they can play many notes between their highest note and their lowest note. A piano is a good example. Music for the piano is written in both bass clef and treble clef. To play it, you read music off the two lines together. Mostly, the bass clef bits are played with the left hand, at the low end of the piano, and the high notes in the treble clef are played with the right hand.

Make edible music!

You will need:

• A clean dinner tray

• Strawberry liquorice laces

• Small, round sweets

This is a great (and tasty) way to make music at home. Pull out five long strawberry laces and place them on the tray in evenly spaced lines. These are the stave. Take a small handful of round sweets for making the notes and shake them lightly over the laces. Make a sketch or take a picture of where they fall. Which notes have you made? Work it out by looking at the rhymes on the next page.

Some composers (people who write new music) actually come up with their ideas in this way! Other ways include rolling dice or flipping a coin. You can eat your music now …

Notes

Now we know that the stave holds the notes of music, we need to know how to read them. Some notes sit on the lines of the stave; other notes sit between the lines. Look at the pictures below. We are now going to give each finger and space a letter to represent a note and make up some rhymes to help us remember them.

Bass notes

Let’s start with the bass clef. (Remember Barry Bass?) The left hand is going to show the notes in the bass clef, starting with the little finger and working towards the thumb. The notes that sit on the lines of the stave are G, B, D, F, A. Remember them like this:

Green

Buses

Drive

Fast

Always

The notes that sit between the lines of the stave are A, C, E, G. Starting with the space between little finger and fourth finger, we can remember those notes with the rhyme:

All

Cows

Eat

Grass

Notice that in music, it is very important to always count up from the bottom or lowest note.

Treble notes

Now let’s learn the notes in the treble clef. We’ll use our right hand, working from little finger to thumb. The notes that sit on the lines of the stave are E, G, B, D, F. Remember them like this:

Every

Good

Boy

Deserves

Football

The notes that sit between the lines of the stave are F, A, C, E. Starting with the space between the little finger and fourth finger, we can remember those notes with a simple word: ‘face’.

Word music*

Can you work out the secret messages hidden in these musical notes? Use the rhymes to work out the letters of each note and write them down to spell out a word. Can you make any note words of your own?

Pitch and melody

The higher a note is on the lines of the stave, the higher it sounds. Remember, the treble clef sounds higher than the bass clef. Highs and lows in music are called pitch.

We can stick notes of different pitches together to make a tune or a melody. However, we have to choose notes carefully or the music will sound strange (unless, of course, that is the effect we’re after!). A melody comes from steps or leaps between notes.

Steps make nice tunes, but these can get a bit boring. Leaps up and down make a melody more interesting. Small leaps are better for a tune, such as a jump of three, four or five notes. Leaps of over five notes can sound sudden and bumpy, and are harder to sing or play. The way we choose which notes to use depends on which key our melody is in.

Steps and half-steps

In music, the distance between any two notes – the difference in sound – is called an interval. Intervals are made up of steps and half-steps. A half-step is the same as a note called a semitone.

The difference between a C and a D is 2 steps or counts through the pattern of notes or letters of the alphabet. We call the number of steps between notes an interval, like a gap. The step of 2 between C and D is then called an interval of a 2nd. The difference between a C and a G is five steps: C, D, E, F and G. so we call this an interval of a 5th. Remember we include the start note when counting! If you look at the piano diagram on the next page, you will see there are black notes between the C & D, D & E, F & G, G & A and A & B; we will learn more about these soon. However, there are no black notes between the E & F and the B & C. These are still 2 steps when we count the notes e.g. B–C, but because there is no note in-between, the gap is smaller. This is a half-step or a semitone. The gap between the C and D, because there is a black note in-between, is a whole step or a tone. Both a tone and a semitone are an interval of a 2nd, just different types.

Scales

When we put together a row of notes that move by steps, we call it a scale. A scale starts and finishes on the same note (but higher or lower), and has a regular pattern of steps in-between, depending on what sort of scale it is. This is a C scale:

C D E F G A B C

Remember that we only use the letters A–G in music notes. All scales have seven different notes, starting from the keynote or tonic of the scale, in this case, the letter C. After that, they start repeating themselves, just higher or lower. So, when we get to G, we start again with A.

We can give each step of the scale a different colour to show which number of the scale it is: we call this ‘degrees of the scale’. So C is the tonic, or 1st degree, represented by the colour red in the diagrams below; D is the 2nd degree and is represented by orange, and so on. Every time we repeat a musical letter, it sounds the same but higher or lower. So, in the C scale we have a low C at the beginning and a high C at the end. We call this gap of eight notes an octave.

Sharps and flats

Can you see that the black keys lie between some of our letter notes? These black keys are where notes called flats and sharps live. We can vary the pitch of a note by adding a flat or a sharp. A note’s sharp is the black key to its right; it makes the note a semitone or half-step higher. A note’s flat is the black key to its left; it makes the note a semitone or half-step lower.

To write a flat note, we use a symbol that looks like a squashed ‘b’. It is added to a note’s letter. A sharp has a symbol similar to a hashtag, and this too is added to the note’s letter. So the letter names of the notes are like this:

There are five sharps in an octave: C, D, F, G and A. There are also five flats: D, E, G, A and B. Notice that each sharp has a matching flat, so for example C and D are the same note!

Major and minor scales

Look at the C scale. It has a specific pattern of steps, which are just white keys, so we call it a major scale. If we played every single note between C and the next C (including the black keys), that would also be a scale, but a different kind, called a chromatic scale.

What happens if we actually start a scale on an A? We get a scale that goes:

A B C D E F G A

A becomes the tonic, or 1st degree note, and B becomes the 2nd degree note. C is now the 3rd degree, and so on. However, it has a different pattern of steps to the C major scale, and if you listen to it, it sounds quite different, too. We call this pattern of steps a minor scale.

If you can, have a go at playing these scales on a piano or keyboard. What does the major scale sound like? What does the minor scale sound like? How would you describe them?

We could also play a major scale starting on a D. However, to keep the same pattern of steps in the scale and make it sound the same as the C major scale, we would have to use some of those sharps and flats on the black keys. The D major scale has an F and a C in it like this:

We can also make a D minor scale. To make the pattern of steps needed for a minor scale, we lose the sharps again and add in a B.

Key

Melodies can be based on any of the scales, and some composers choose their favourite or one they feel has a particular mood. The composer needs to tell us which sharps or flats to play throughout the melody, and so writes them at the beginning of the music like this:

This is called the key signature. Musicians learn all the scales and the number of sharps and flats they have, so they can tell which key to play in just by looking at the key signature.

The number of sharps and flats changes between all the keys, major and minor. However, the order in which they happen never changes. We know the scale of D major has two sharps – F and C. F is the most common sharp. Remember the scale of D minor? It has one flat – B, the most common flat.

Order of sharps

If a key is sharp, the sharps will appear in a certain order. The order of sharps is: F, C, G, D, A, E, B. We can use a rhyme to help us remember it:

Father Christmas Gave Dad An Electric Blanket

If a key has one sharp, it is the first one in the list. If a key has two sharps, these are the first two on the list, and so on. So, for a key that has four sharps in it, we count through the rhyme, starting from F:

F C G D

This key signature is E major.

Order of flats

If a key is flat, the flats will appear in a certain order. The order of flats is B, E, A, D, G, C, F. The rhyme we can use to help us remember it is:

Blanket Explodes And Dad Gets Cold Feet

Notice how the order of flats is the same as the order of sharps, just backwards! If a key has one flat, it is the first one in the list. If a key has two flats, these are the first two on the list, and so on.

So, a key that has four flats would have:

B E A D

This key signature is A major.

Relative major and minor

There are 13 different key signatures all together. Some have no sharps or flats; others have one to six sharps or flats. However, there are actually more keys than that because for each note you can have a major or a minor key. Each major key signature has the same number of sharps and flats as a minor key signature. They are known as the relative major and minor, like cousins!

Think back to the C major scale, which had no sharps or flats. Then we discovered the minor scale of A. That also had no sharps or flats, so C major and A minor are relative major and minor.

Harmony

Music would be very boring if it was all just one note at a time. The best music has lots of notes sounding at once, which gives the music different colours and moods. When there are several notes happening at once, we call this harmony. Harmonies add depth to a melody.

Using the scale of C major, we can take the first note, the third note and the fifth note to make a group of three notes. These notes are C, E and G, and playing them together makes a chord:

C D E F G A B C

They look like this on our music: