Have you checked out About.com online? It has lots of “neighborhoods” featuring information about all sorts of interests, and one of them is music education. Started in 1996, About.com has been run since 2005 by the New York Times company.

The music education site presents information and resources on music theory, history of music, profiles of musicians and composers, online music games, and lesson plans. Every week a newletter is emailed to those who sign up, with links to their articles about specific topics within each of these areas–spotlights on certain performers or composers from various musical genres, lesson plans, a free music resource of the week involving songs, links and downloads; timely series built around, for example, Women’s History Month, Jazz Appreciation Month, and Black History Month. There are ideas about practicing, buying instruments, history timelines, etc.

Apart from the music education site, the larger site, about.com also has “neighborhoods” devoted specifically to folk music, classical, guitar, top 40/pop music, and children’s music. You can also sign up to receive weekly emails with highlights and links for any of these topics.

When teaching a student or a class a particular musical piece, I share the history of the song with them. This induces more interest for the student. I will occasionally write a blog about the history of a particular song that I use with the students.

The first song I would like to discuss is “Let It Be”, recorded by the Beatles. I teach this song on the piano, guitar and bass guitar, and all of my students love learning the song.

Paul McCartney, who wrote the song, sings the vocal, backing vocal, and plays piano and the maracas. John Lennon plays bass, while George Harrison sings backing vocals while playing lead guitar. And, of course, Ringo Starr plays the drums. Other instruments used in the song are an organ and electric piano played by Billy Preston, and two trumpets, two trombones, a tenor sax and cellos played by uncredited musicians.

During the summer of 1968, the Beatle sessions had become hostile. McCartney was worried about the band’s future and threw everything into keeping the group alive. One night he had a dream in which his deceased mom, Mary, appeared to him and told him not to get so depressed about things. She told him to just :Let it be”. This dream quickly became a song.

For some time Lennon thought Mother Mary was the Virgin Mary, and wanted to add a giggle to the song. When Paul said “No”, Lennon went into the studio one night before the song was to be cut, and added a little phrase to the beginning of Let It Be, “Now we’d like to sing ‘All The Angels Come’”. Paul was not happy.

Students know this song, and are instructed to play the song smoothly with a flowing progression. The bass lines consist of many runs from one chord to another. The piano also progresses smoothly from one chord to another (chords from C down to G use C, G/b, F/A and G). Thus, this song teaches students flowing techniques and sequence. Let It Be!

This is a music theory site that I have used with my students for years. The site has three sections: Lessons, Trainers, and Utilities.
LESSONS:

• The Staff, Clefs and ledger Lines
• Note duration
• Measures and Time Signatures
• Rest duration, Dots and Ties
• Simple, Compound and Odd meters
• Scales and Scale degrees
• Much more

Trainer

• Note
• Key
• Interval
• Triad
• Keyboard
• Guitar
• Brass
• Interval Ear Trainer
• Scale Ear Trainer
• Chord Ear Trainer

The trainer section is the area I use the most in working with students. For example, the Interval Ear Trainer will play two notes, one at a time. You select from a list what the interval is. The program keeps a running grade/score and, if you give a wrong answer, the correct answer will appear. I use this trainer for my voice students. My students tell me that this training also helps them in the school choir when they have to sight read new music.

Utilities

• Chord Calculator
• Staff Paper generator
• Matrix generator

Go to musictheory.net and try it out. It is free, and one of the best theory sites I have seen and used.

The pentatonic scale is a five note scale, using intervals I, II, III, V and VI. There are several rumors on the origin of the scale. The one I am attached to is the scale was found several centuries ago in Asia from the black notes on the piano.

The scale is used by rock and blues musicians to play lead guitar. One famous lead guitarist that uses this scale is Eric Clapton. Other instruments, such as the Flute, also play the scale to an accompaniment.
What is unique about this scale is the notes in the scale can be played with the chords of the same major key or relative minor key. This inspires the student to be creative in choosing the notes in the scale to play with an accompanist. Students actually go into a trance playing the pentatonic scale while I am playing the chords in the same key.

I also found that the song, “Amazing Graze”, only uses the notes in pentatonic scale for the melody. Students that are familiar with the song are giving an assignment to figure what notes in the scale are used to play the melody. This is great ear training for the student.

Do you use the pentatonic scale, or know something of it’s history? Let me know your thoughts on this amazing scale.

Whether for beginners who need to understand what an octave is, or for advanced players (and teachers!) who just find it interesting, below is a chart I put together to compare musical notes to natural sounds such as insect buzzes.

In case you’d like to do some of your own comparisons, here’s a link to a chart showing all the frequencies of the notes on a piano.

I like to point out to students that anything moving 440 times per second sounds like the A above middle C. A mosquito sounds a little higher than that; a fly or bee buzzes lower. An electronic hum is usually between an A# and a B, because it is a multiple of the 60 cycles per second frequency of our electric current.

It’s reassuring for students to know that it requires no musical training for our ears to sense when two notes are in unison (which creates hope that one can learn to tune an instrument!) and when a note matches the note an octave above or below.  What we call an octave is a pair of notes, the higher one having exactly double the frequency (or vibrations/beats per second) of the lower one.  Our ears naturally hear this harmony, and also hear the dissonance if the two notes are slightly off from each other.

Do you work with beginners who wonder why two different notes can both be called “A” and why there are only 7 letters in the musical scale?  How do you usually explain this in your teaching?

Without further ado, below is the comparison of natural sounds and musical notes. Enjoy! (more…)

In teaching any students, but especially beginners or when teaching music by ear, it is very useful to be familiar with scales and arpeggios. These patterns help us group notes so that we don’t have to think about each note individually.

For beginners, scales help confirm what it means to play “up” and “down” from one note to another. It’s amazing sometimes how long it takes for some beginners to feel comfortable with “up” and “down”, especially adults who sometimes second-guess themselves.

But there are more scales out there than we usually think about, and they can be useful for students of all levels. For example, beginners can easily work with pentatonic scales, which limit the number of notes they have to work with while still yielding beautiful melodies. Advanced players can certainly benefit from a familiarity with pentatonic scales as they create moods from major pentatonic with a country sound, to the minor pentatonic with its bluesy feel.

The major pentatonic is generally notes 1,2,3,5,6 of the major scale, while the minor pentatonic uses the same notes starting on relative minor, resulting in notes 1,3,4,5,7 of the minor scale.

But that’s only a beginning. Classical major scales, and the melodic and harmonic minor scales are essential learning because they are so commonly used.

Then there are the modes, which may seem to arbitrarily start on different notes of the scale, but also happen to represent common scales from different cultures. They can sometimes be best understood in this cultural context rather than as musicological theory. For example, (more…)

In 7th grade, our music teacher tantalized us with ideas about the harmonic series. I remember asking him about it after class, and he gave me a copy of the Instrumentalist magazine with an article and diagrams showing the connection between music and the frequencies of sounds.

I was fascinated, and I’ve seen students be equally interested, and even taken by surprise, at this meeting of music and science. It adds another dimension to learning about music besides the struggle of trying to coordinate hands on an instrument and understand the organized beauty of melody and harmony.

The harmonic series explains why anyone can match two pitches, and why octaves have notes of the same name, and are almost as easy to identify as unison pitches. The fact that one octave is double the frequency of the lower one helps string players understand why a string rings sympathetically if the octave note above it is played in tune.  Even beginners can hear this, and since there’s a physical, scientific reason for it, they don’t have to worry that it’s tied in with talent, or years of study. 

It’s fun to point out that anything in the world that vibrates at high speed will create a musical pitch–a hummingbird wing, or a card buzzing on bicycle spokes–and if we know how fast it’s vibrating, we know what pitch it is.  For example, the hum in our houses and our sound systems is between an E and an F, because it’s a multiple of the 60-cycle vibration of our electric current.

It’s amazing to see that if a string divided in half, the resulting pitch is an octave higher. Even more surprising is to find out that if you divide the string in thirds, you hear a note a fifth higher than the octave. Wind players work with this all the time, and for string players this fact helps understand why the fifths our open strings are tuned to are pretty easy to hear–the next easiest thing to identify after the octave.

So the revelations add up: one-half the length of a string (or column of air) makes a vibration double the frequency of the full length, and sounds an octave higher. One-third the length triples the frequency, yielding a note that’s a fifth higher than the octave. One-fourth quadruples the frequency of the vibration, adding a fourth (resulting in a note two octaves above the original). One-fifth quintuples the frequency and adds a major third.

On it goes, adding a minor third, a major second and so on. Some say the history of Western classical music follows the harmonic series, with each generation spotlighting the next level of the series as its featured interval. This idea doesn’t apply too well to some of the baroque composers who loved playing with dissonant intervals. But it seems to fit the general historical pattern of succeeding generations of composers moving from unison to fifths to thirds to seconds to twelve-tones to even quarter-tones in their compositions.

I say Western classical music, because music of other cultures or of local populations, whose music is categorized as folk or traditional or world music, have developed other sound patterns.  For example, the Ottomans went so far as to divide the octave into 57 pitches, and this can be heard in classical Turkish music.  Some Indian music apparently divides the scale into 22 pitches.

It’s especially intriguing, I think, that the two most ambiguous notes in the harmonic series–the multiples of the original frequency that don’t quite match our seven-note scale–are the third and the seventh notes of the scale.  It’s no coincidence that these are the notes most freely toyed with in most musical cultures. In classical music, these notes determine major and minor.  Harmonic and melodic minor scales play around with the seventh note of the scale.

The blues likes to bend primarily the third and the seventh notes. Many old fiddle traditions play the thirds and sevenths ambiguously, sort of halfway between the major and minor thirds and sevenths. This can be done easily on a violin by spreading the fingers out evenly:  place the second finger halfway between the first and third, instead of next to one or the other to form a half step. You might assume a player might do this only because of a lack of training, but in fact, this ambiguous pitch is maintained by some fiddlers even in other keys, so it’s clearly part of a way of hearing the pitches. An example is the playing of Joe Cormier, a great Cape Breton fiddler, or old recordings of traditional Shetland fiddlers.  A musician unfamiliar with those traditions would simply assume the player is out of tune.

We often view science as making things better known and more predictable, but it seems to me that learning about the harmonic series and the science of sound only makes musicmaking more engaging, mysterious and awe-inspiring.