Chapter 9

MUSIC

OVERVIEW

This Learning materials provides an overview of the music and how they’re used. They include:

• Definition of music
• Music and Sound
• Music as a form of Communication
• Origin of Music
• Musical Culture
• Element of Music
• Voice
• Musical Instruments
• Some classical musician

This chapter looks at creative ideas for approaching, identifying and planning a
successful music lesson.

OBJECTIVES

Upon successful completion of this learning materials, you should be able to:

• Understand the historical developments of music.

• Recognize the elements of music.
• Appreciate music by using the evaluation chart.
Definition
Music is the artful arrangement of sounds; the most common and conventional definition of
music. The definition may vary depending on the cultural setting for music is virtually found in
every known culture in the world. The meaning and purpose of Music depends on the cultural
setting and it may be too broad and some were too narrow. The modern conventional term for
music came from 13th Century French “musique.”

The original word is Greek “mousike” which means the “art of the muse.”

MUSIC AND SOUND

• Anything that can be heard or audible is sound.

• Vibration that travels thru the air and water or other medium that can be perceived by
the human ear.

• Sound can be arranged in a harmonious and beautiful manner to please the listener.
• There is rhythm everywhere; repetitive tapping your fingers or pencils at the top of your
desk creates a rhythm which sometimes you enjoy, clapping your hand in with regular
intervals fast or slow creates sounds that invites children to dance, and there
were a lot of human actions and activities that produce sounds which adds to our
embellishment.
• Sometimes the rhythm or noise is unpleasant and too noisy for us to accommodate and
when you shout at your sister or brother to stop whatever they are doing that creates
those noise; although these sounds are also irregular repetitive pattern but they
are somehow not pleasing to your ears.
• Sound that appear delightful and pleasing to the ear of the listener can be considered
music; but most of the times sounds that appear pleasing to our ear is limited by some
societal aspect like culture and ideology.

Music and Sound?

• The basic sense perception that makes music available to human beings or makes man
capable of producing music available to human beings or makes man capable of
producing music is “hearing.”
• The eardrum is the most sensitive part of our ear that translates sound waves into
electrical signal that later is stored and translated by our brain.
 Measuring sounds in decibels

• Some philosophers argue that even without the sense perception of the ear and sound
waves we can create music; for music is just a mental image and it is a by-product of
this image.

Music as a form of Communication

• There are a lot of disagreement on whether to consider what you hear as music or not.
• The disagreement is rooted from the taste and preference of the person or a group.
• Thus, music is for sound like correct use of grammar in language which allows people to
communicate with one another.

1. Dynamics – sound and volume.

2. Register – range of music or voice.
3. Mode – arrangement of a set of tone
4. Articulation – sound arrangement or the rules in constructing/producing music is evident in
all culture that produce and create music.

Music and our Soul

• The Greek believed that music must be heard in proper mode, children needs to listen
to music in a certain mode beneficial to their moral development and listening to other
modes might be harmful to the child.
• Confucian thoughts advised that music must be employed not to entertain but to purify
the soul.
 Ancient Chinese Musicians

Origin of Music

• We don’t have much knowledge of the origin of music, ancient people from the advent of our
evolution as thinking man might have created audible sounds that entertained them or hymns
they employed for their rituals and ceremonies.
• Our first written document about music was written by Pythagoras in the 6 th century B.C. when
he argued the existence of the music of the sphere, it is a perfectly harmonious music, inaudible
in earth which is produced by movements of the stars and the planets.
• The musical scale of ancient China was derived through arithmetic from a basic note:

1. Each degree of the scale was related to the cardinal points (north, east, west, and south), the
elements. The season, the planets, and the months of the year, colors, materials, number
and
parts of the human body, animal, smells and so forth;
2. For music can be found and created by nature, thus music can only be created in harmony
also
of the universe;
3. There are eight sources of musical sound found in the universe; metal, stone, silk, bamboo,
calabash, terracotta, skin and wood.

The Indian regarded their music or “ragas” to have magical or curative powers:

1. Traditionally played at specific hours and specific seasons, to depart from this timetable will
be
harmful to both player and listener;
2. In tribal communities for example in Tibet music appease both the spirits and their animals,
and musicians are employed not just for entertainment but for their religious significance.
3. Christian and Jewish employed music as a form of communication to supernatural begins like
their God during mass celebration and reading of the verse.

Music Culture

According to Duke Ellington, there are only two kinds of music – good and bad. It is an
argument that each cultural community or social grouping has its own valuation or appreciation
of what is good and bad music. In a crowd of audience of one known musician in the country,
there is always polarity, the crowd is divided into two:

1. Loyal audience identifies the nuances and variety of notes and styles employed by their
favorite
performer;
2. It may be less pleasing to other listener and thinks that all they heard sounds the same.

Thus, music can be performed well or it may turn out ugly which is based according to what the
culture believes as good or bad music, the listeners need to be well informed and active in
listening.

Uniformed and inactive listener, however, will always turn the most brilliant composer and
performer in their worst performance.

Another category, of music is art music (high culture) and music of the people (popular culture);

1. Artistic music demands high level of training on the part of the performer and high level of
sophistication on the part of the audience, music is relatively limited to the elite member of the
society.
2. Popular music and folk style on the other hand started out as easier to perform and not
complicated to the ears of the listener thus attracts wide audience mostly coming from the
lower
ranks of the society, there is a tendency for it to become sophisticated later on.

The third category of music in terms of sophistication and popularity is the subculture:

1. Rock and roll music for example established itself as popular music but distinction in styles
and
instruments employed created new generations of rock music (subculture) like the gothic,
grouch, hard core, emo, alternative and techno.
2. Symphony No. 4 in G Major by Austrian composer Gustav Mahler and Suite: Pour le Piano by
French composer Claude Debussy can be thought of as European art music, and both were
completed in 1901. Once again, however, we find music with clearly different sounds. The
most
obvious difference is in performance medium: orchestra and voice in the Mahler work, piano
in
the Debussy composition. The two works also differ in pitch structure. The Mahler symphony
is still organized around a set of harmonic relationships among pitches and would be describe
as tonal.

Most modernizing and modern country however, have its own subculture on subculture music,
thus it creates a multi-layered musical culture.

Elements of Music
At its simplest, music consist of a short, unaccompanied melody, known as monophony. But
even the simplest melody consist of many important components.
1. Some of the most obvious of these are the varying heights or pitches of the tones, their
loudness, their timbres and their articulations.

Pitch

1. Depends on the rate of vibration, or frequency, of sound waves that produce a particular tone.
2. Higher pitches have higher frequency (greater rapidly of vibrations) than lower pitches.
3. Most musical cultures recognize the octave, a unique relationship of two pitches. Two pitches
are an octave apart when their rates of vibration form an exact 1:2 ratio.

Illustration of High and Low Pitch in a Piano

Scale

1. Each musical culture has one or more sets of tunings that define the gaps or intervals
between
pitches in that group’s music.
2. A great deal of Western folk music, along with much folk music and art music around the
world,
conforms to a five-tone, or pentatonic, scale.
3. The best-known form of the pentatonic scale contains no half steps. Instead, it is made up of
three whole-steps and two step-and-a-half interval.
 Common scale type pentatonic
Time

1. Musical rhythm is defined broadly as everything having to do with the way music uses time.
2. More specifically, this includes characteristics such as durations of tones and silences, and
patterns of durations, both of which can focus attention on certain tones making them more
prominent than others.
3. These more-prominent or accented tones often mark regular patterns that enable listeners to
perceive tones as members of larger groups.

Harmony

1. In most music, and especially in Western music, important and style-defining patterns are
formed by pitches that overlap with one another in time, producing a chord, or harmony.
2. Two or more tones that occur at the same time form a harmonic relationship called a block
chord.
3. These tones are called broken chords or arpeggios when heard separately but in sufficiently
rapid succession that the listener perceives them as part of the same harmony.

VOICE
Before mass media and music recording in tape, VHSs, CDs and DVD’s musical culture can be
identified and shared thru musical performances, musical scales, recognizable performances
such as bending of notes in a certain way and etc.

Voice is an important element in music for most early cultures and some contemporary ones like
opera:

1. Alto or Contralto lowest of the three principal ranges of voice found in women or young boys,
the other two being the soprano and mezzo-soprano.
2. Soprano (Italian sopra, “above”), highest female voice. The normal range of the soprano is
about octaves, generally with its lowest note at middle C, although many sopranos exceed
these limits. Sopranos are classified as dramatic, lyric, or coloratura.
3. Bass (voice) (latin basis, “base, foot, pedestal”, influenced by Fresh basse and Italian basso),
deepest, or lowest, male singing voice.
4. Tenor, highest natural adult male voice, having an approximate range of two octaves, starting
usually at C below middle C.

Luciano Pavarotti is one of the most popular tenor in modern history

Choral Music, music sung by a group of people, using two or more singers to perform each
musical line. The term part-long is used for vocal music having one singer for each part. Choral
music is written for choruses, or choirs, consisting either of adults, children, or both.

A Chorale

MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
Percussion instruments are the most common instrument.

There are two types of percussion instrument:

a. “membranophones” if they produce sound through the vibration of a stretched skin or other
membrane like the drums.
b. “idiophones” if they produce sounds through the natural resonance when strucked, rubbed,
plucked or shaken like hollowed logs, bells, gongs, xylophones and piano.

TYPES
1. Drum (musical instrument) is a musical instrument consisting of one or two stretched
membranes, called heads, held across a bowl-shaped or tubular frame, called a shell, and
sounded by percussion; that is, by striking the instrument with the hands or with sticks.

A Japanese drum

2. Bell, musical percussion instrument is a hollow cup-shape vessel, usually made of metal but
sometimes made of wood, pottery, or other material, that produces sound when struck with a
clapper or hammer.
3. Xylophone (Greek xylon, “wood”, phone, “sound” wooden) is a musical percussion instrument
consisting of a series of graduated wooden bars that are struck with mallets to produce
sound.

Xylophone
4. Gong is percussion instrument with a bronze disk that produces sound when struck by a
knobbed beater. Many gongs have a central boss, or dome, and most have turned-down rim,
they vibrate at their center.

Piano is a stringed keyboard musical instrument that is derived from the harpsichord and the
clavichord. Also called the pianoforte, it differs from its predecessors principally in the
introduction of a hammer-and-lever action that allows the player to modify the intensity of sound
by the stronger or weaker touch of the fingers. For this reason the earliest known model (1709)
was called a gravicembalo col piano e forte (Italian for “harpsichord with soft and loud”).

A Piano

Wind Instrument
Wind instrument, or aerophones, produce sound in several ways. The performer’s lips may
produce the vibration, as with brass instruments. The vibration may be produced by a column of
air split across a sharp edge (flutes, pipes, whistles) or the vibration may be produced by one or
two reeds, as with instruments such as the clarinet, saxophone, oboe, bassoon, or the Korean
oboe called a piri.

TYPES

1. Flute, tubular or sometimes globular musical instrument enclosing air that is set in vibration
when the player’s breath is directed against the sharp edge of the hole.
 A Flute

2. Bagpipe is a musical instrument in which wind is supplied to one or more reed-sounded pipes
from a bag inflated by the performer, either through a blowpipe or by a bellows. Because the
wind supply is continuous, the sounding pipes normally cannot be silent, and repeated
melody
notes must be articulated by inserting grace notes (notes of extremely short duration)
between
them.

A Bagpipe

3. Clarinet is a woodwind musical instrument, essentially a cylindrical-bore pipe sounded by a

single beating reed that is clipped over a slot in a mouthpiece set in the upper end of the pipe.
The lower end flares out into a bell.
4. Saxophone comes from the family of reed-sound wind musical instruments. The saxophone
was invented by the Belgian instrument-maker Adolphe Sax about 1840. The saxophone
combines in its construction the single reed and mouthpiece of the clarinet, a metal body, and
a widened version of the conical bore of the oboe.
 A saxophone

5. Oboe is a double-reed wind instrument with a wood body and narrow conical bore.
6. Bassoon is a bass double-reed woodwind instrument. It has about 2.4m (about 8 ft) of
conical-
bore wood tubing in a narrow U shape, in four sections, or joints.

The string or chordophone

Cordophone family has several branches:

a. In one branch, which includes the zither, dulcimer, and Japanese koto, strings are stretched
across a flat body.
b. In a second branch, each instrument has a neck, for example the lute, guitar, Indian sitar,
Arabic ‘ud, or violin.
c. A third branch includes plucked instruments with multiple strings, such as the lyre or the harp,
where each string produces only one pitch.

TYPES

1. Zither is any stringed instrument in which the strings run across a body or resonator, and that
has no protruding arms or neck.
 A zither

2. Dulcimer is a musical instrument in which wire strings, in courses of two to five per note, are
stretched across a shallow, trapezoidal sound box and are sounded by light, spoon-shape
beaters, producing a vibrant, undamped, metallic sound. The dulcimer, one of the ancestors
of
the piano, originated in the Middle East, possible as the Persian santir.
3. Koto is a musical instrument, a Japanese long zither, with a long, convex upper board and
movable ivory bridge for each of its 13 silk strings.
4. Lute is stringed instrument widely played in the 14th to 18th centuries and revived in the 20th
century, also generically, any stringed instrument having strings that run in a parallel plane to
the soundboard and along a protruding neck.
5. Lyre is stringed musical instrument, in which two arms jut out on one side of the instrument’s
body and at their tips support a yoke or crossbar to which gut strings are attached. The
strings
run to the body, across the belly or soundboard, over a bridge, and to a string holder at the
lower end of the belly.
6. Harp is a musical instrument in which strings, sounded by plucking, run between a neck and
a
sound box (also called the body or resonator). The strings run perpendicular to the sound box
(instead of parallel, as on a guitar).
 A Harp

7. Guitar is a string instrument, usually plucked and played with fingers or a pick.

Electronic instrument, or electrophone:

1. Refers broadly to any means of generating, modifying, or amplifying musical sounds
electronically.
2. Thus, any instrument played through an amplifier becomes an electronic instrument.
3. The term most often refers to instruments that generate sound electronically.

Orchestra replaced the usually modest instrumental groups of the baroque era:

1. The classical orchestra was dominated by the string section-violins, violas, cellos, and bass-
which played most of the melodic material:

a. Violins is a bowed stringed instrument, the highest pitched member of the violin family.

Violin Family

b. Viola is as an alto member of the violin family, having four strings tuned c g dl al (c = C below
middle.

al = A above middle C). About 2 to 7 cm (1 to 3.5 in0 longer than the violin, and tuned a fifth
lower, the viola varies more in size than do the violin and cello.

c. Cello or Violoncello is a large, low-pitched musical instrument of the violin family, held
between
the performer’s knees.
d. Double Bass is the largest and lowest-pitched member of the violin family. Also known as the
contrabass, the double bass is usually about 1.8 m (about 6 ft.) high and has four strings
tuned
to sound EE AA D G (EE = third E below middle C) and notated an octave higher.
e. The woodwind section generally had two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, and, by the end of
 the century, the newly developed clarinet.
f. The brass section might consist of two trumpets and two horns, and the percussion section
generally had two timpani.
g. Horn is a class of wind instruments that usually have a conical opening or derive from an
animal
horn or tusk. Horns are sounded by the vibration of the player’s lips against a mouthpiece (as
with a trumpet).
h. Timpani are European orchestral kettle drums with a single head, or membrane, of skin
stretched over a cauldron-shape frame, or shell. The timpani were derived from the medieval
European nakers, in turn taken from the naqqara of the Islamic countries.

Anatomy of an Orchestra

Composers take advantage of the variety and capabilities of the instruments by writing materials
with specific instruments in mind.

MUSICAL GENIUS (Classical)

Joseph Haylon (1732-1809)

Austrian composer is recognized as a dominant force in the development of the musical style of
the classical era in the second half of the 18th century.

1. Surprise (no. 94), Military (no. 100), Clock (no. 101), Drum Roll (no. 103), and London (no.
104).

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-17910)

1. Austrian composer, who is considered one of the most brilliant and versatile compose ever.
2. He worked in all musical genres of his era, wrote inspired, works in each genre, and
produced
an extraordinary number of compositions, especially considering his short life.
3. By the time Mozart died at age 35, he had completed 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23
string quartets, 17 piano sonatas, 7 major operas, and numerous works for voice and other
instruments.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

1. A German composer who is considered one of the greatest musicians of all time.
2. Having begun his career as an outstanding improviser at the piano and composer of piano
music, Beethoven went on to compose string quartets and other kinds of chamber music,
songs, two masses, an opera, and nine symphonie.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

1. A German composer and one of the world’s greatest musical geniuses. His work marks the
culmination of the baroque style.
2. A man of inexhaustible energy and imagination, Bach composed in every form known in the
baroque era, except the opera.
3. His enormous output includes works for the organ, violin, clavichord and harpsichord
(predecessors of the piano), chamber orchestra, and voice.
 SELF-ASSESSTMENT QUESTIONS 9
I. Matching Type: Match category A to category B and write the letter of the correct answer
before the number.

A B
_____1. Drum a. Percussion
_____2. Keyboard b. String
_____3. Lute c. Wind
_____4. Oboe d. Techno
_____5. Piano e. Harmony
_____6. Rate of vibration f. Pitch
_____7. Style-defining patterns g. Sound
_____8. Anything that is audible h. Scale
_____9. Define musical rhythm i. Time
____10. Interval between pitches

II. Identification: Supply the musical concept needed below.

3 major types of musical instrument
11. _________________________________________________________________________
12. _________________________________________________________________________
13. _________________________________________________________________________

2 major female voice qualities

14. _________________________________________________________________________
15.__________________________________________________________________________

2 major male voice quality

16. _________________________________________________________________________
17. _________________________________________________________________________

3 musical Geniuses

18. _________________________________________________________________________
19. _________________________________________________________________________
20. _________________________________________________________________________