PREFACE

This manual is designed to teach people how to read music.¹ It is different from other books with the same purpose for the following reasons:

1. It treats all of its readers as if they were learning how to sing in a chorus that performs with notated music.² Every piece of information and every musical skill introduced in this book is applied directly to the process of converting musical notation into vocal sound. This skill is also useful to instrumentalists learning to read music.³

2. It assumes that its readers know very little or nothing about music notation, and it begins with the most simple musical activities: finding different notes at the piano, playing them, and singing them back.⁴ People with previous musical experience will progress through this book more rapidly than beginners.

3. Although it begins at the most introductory stage of teaching students how to read music, this book immediately encourages its readers to try to perceive the unique emotional⁵ and aesthetic⁶ contents of every musical composition, and to use this new sensitivity to perform even very simple pieces expressively.

4. It begins with music that is tonal, a term that refers to music in which one note can be called the home-note ‒ a note to which the other notes want to return. Notice how the short melody in the example below feels complete when it returns to and ends on the note played at the very beginning (C), the note that is also played in the lower part, and which is the home-note for that particular melody.⁷

5. It is informal in tone: the pronouns I and you appear frequently to give the reader the impression that the author is always in the room, eager to answer questions and to help.

6. It is designed to help readers work through two other music reading texts, Melodia, by Samuel Cole and Leo Lewis, and The Oxford Folk Song Sight Singing Series, edited by Edgar Crowe, Annie Lawton, and W. Gillies Whittaker.

If you do what you are asked to do in this manual, you will learn how to read music notation and how to become a more expressive musician.

Steve Peisch

1. The term "read" describes the act of looking at and trying to understand visual markings other than words, including maps, graphs, drawings, and musical notation.
2. Many excellent vocal groups learn their music entirely "by ear" and use no music notation whatsoever.
3. For many centuries, instrumentalists have been trained to read music by encouraging them to sing from notation, and this tradition continues today in all modern conservatories.
4. Identifying the name of the note, finding the piano key it refers to, and depressing it with sudden force to create a musical tone.
5. Music's ability to express different various shades of emotion is its most magical characteristic.
6. The term "aesthetic" refers to the unique beauty of a particular piece of music, dance, visual art, or literature.
7. Music also exists that is described as "atonal," meaning it has no "home note" or "tonic."

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