Wikibooks: Music Theory/Music Notation Systems

• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Music_Theory/Music_Notation_Systems

There are many ways to describe musical notes including solfege letters numbers tablature and of course the standard music staffs. It is important to have a working knowledge of all of these (except tablature as it is instrument specific and many instruments do not use it at all). =Letters= Letter names give a label to each letter of the C major scale C D E F G A B. Notes can be sharpened or flattened between D and E comes a note called either D sharp ( D sharp ) or E flat ( E flat ). Even more confusingly E can be called D dblsharp ( D double sharp ) and D can be called E dblflat ( E double flat )! For now you need only know that a D sharp and an E flat are enharmonically equivalent (that is they have the same pitch but serve a different ) in the simplified tuning most commonly used today. You will learn about diatonic function later. These are the letter names used in English Dutch and possibly a few other languages. However Germany Scandinavia (such as Iceland Denmark Sweden) and Slavic countries have another system their C major scale is C D E F G A H. Their H corresponds to our B. They also use the letter B to mean the note we call B flat. They do not use special letters for any other notes however for instance what we call a C sharp they would call Cis Ciss or Cís (depending on the language) which literally means C sharp . We will not concern ourselves with these differences as this alternate system is almost never encountered in English language texts. Some other countries don t use letters for notes at all but instead the fixed doh solfege system where Do or Ut always means the note C. This is an inflexible system unlike the moveable doh one used in English where Do (or Doh ) can be any pitch. =Solfege= Solfege is one of the most common ways of expressing musical notes for vocalists. In fact in some countries such as Spain Portugal Italy and France solfege is always used instead of note names. The major scale in solfege runs do re mi fa sol la ti. (Note in some regions such as Portugal ti is called si ...