What does it mean to consume the page? How do we look at a piece of music and see everything that we need to do? Things like: notes, rhythms, dynamics, and articulations? This is the architecture of the music. Without it, it is hard to get to the nuances of vowels, blend and balance. And it slows rehearsal way down! So that we can have fast, lively rehearsals, we need to do what a mentor of mine, Stafford Boyd, says: “sometimes you have to go slow to go fast”.

So that is what we are going to do. We are going to slow down and spend time looking at the fundamentals of music architecture. The goal will be to become fluent in the following areas:

Note Names; Key Signatures; Interval Recognition (visual and aural); Time Signatures; and Understanding Rhythmic Units within Time Signatures

Understanding PITCH is about understanding notes in relation to each other in the context of a key signature. A series of notes will be a collection of pitches that go up, down or stay the same. The trick is to hear the pitches in the context of a scale. If you can find DO and SO you are going to do great. TI and RE are neighbors to DO. LA and FA are neighbors to SO.

Go to the STUDY LINKS and click on musictheory.net! Go to exercises and click on Key signatures. The name of the key is DO. See how you can begin to visually recognize key signatures.