Scales
Our most basic concept of music is built around our understanding of a musical scale. A scale is just a series of notes that contain a particular set of relationships. Although we think of a scale as made up of notes, it is really the relationships that are the most important factor in making music. The easiest way to think about these relationships is as the gaps or spaces between the notes (what are referred to in music theory as the 'intervals').
While different musical cultures use the same notes, they do not all use the same gaps or spaces, and this is what differentiates Western music from Chinese music or Arabic music. This set of relationships that we call a scale is expressed in a choice of seven notes from the possible twelve that exist in our 'octave' of notes from one 'tonic' or key note to the next one up the ladder. In other words between one 'C' and another 'C' there are the following notes, where '#' ='sharp':
C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B and again C.
But our scale only uses seven of these notes:
C D E F G A B and again C.
Wait a minute, I can hear you say: doesn't that make eight notes. Well, yes and no. We've counted C once at the beginning of the scale so we don't need to count it again at the end. But why include it at all then? This is where the relationships come in. Try singing a scale or playing it on any instrument, but play only the first seven notes up to B. Sounds like something is missing, doesn't it? We want to hear that final C, and this is not just through the force of habit. Without the last C we are missing an important relationship - that gap that exists between B and C. And this is a very important gap, indeed.
Between each of our twelve notes in an octave is a gap called a semitone. If we remove one of the notes from our group of twelve we create a gap of two semitones or a whole tone. Our scale is made up of a very specific set of semitones and tones and looks like this:
C tone D tone E semitone F tone G tone A tone B semitone C
This pattern of tones and semitones is what we call the major scale. And this is something we recognise immediately in a piece of music. What is interesting is that we recognise this scale whether or not the notes are in the nice ascending order that we see above, or even if they appear in a piece of music like the one below.
The simplest way to demonstrate your ability is ask yourself if you've ever heard anyone play a piece of music that you hadn't heard before and whether
you were able to hear any 'wrong' notes. How would you know which notes were wrong if you didn't know the piece? The answer is that you 'know' the scale - at least as far as which relationships are acceptable and which aren't. Of course, this makes listening to music with different or 'altered' scales a bit more difficult to listen to at first. They just don't sound right, until you come to learn the scale patterns that are being used. Music isn't really an international language, but like foreign languages we can learn to communicate by learning something about that language.
Key signatures
Often music is referred to by its key signature. This is indicated at the beginning of each line of 'traditional' Western music.
This added sharp sign (#), for example, simply tells the performer which set of notes will be used to make up the scale for this particular piece. In traditional Western music there are only two types of scales: Major or Minor, and each 'mode' can have 12 different key signatures making twenty-four in all. The key signature indicates the 'tonic' note of each key or the note on which the scale pattern begins. Therefore the key of G Major (as indicated above) revolves around the tonic of G and uses the notes:
G tone A tone B semitone C tone D tone E tone F# semitone G
The key 'signature' - in the case of the above example the added '#' sign on the top line of the staff - tells the performer that one note will be altered from the C Major scale. C Major is the simplest scale (which doesn't use any sharps or flats). In the case of G Major the performer will always play an F# rather than an F. When this happens, because our Major scale is non-symmetrical in its organisational pattern, our ear will gravitate towards the note G as being the central note or 'tonic' of the scale. Note that the pattern of gaps in the G Major scale is the same as the pattern in C Major.
So why bother with all the sharps and flats - why not do everything in C Major? Certainly most beginning music students would agree with this proposition. But the pitch level of a piece is fixed by the key signature. You may have experienced the problem of the wrong pitch level when someone started out a rendition of 'Happy Birthday' and when you got to the third line (Happy BIRTH day, dear ...) you found that note on BIRTH to be out of your reach. The pitch level or key signature was just too high. Like voices, instruments also have preferred pitch ranges and the clever composer will understand how to exploit these - to use the right key for a given work. There is even a belief among some that different keys each have a different mood or character, although there is plenty of argument about this. Let's just say that different keys allow music to be more convenient.
