From the course: Learning Music Notation
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The staff: Background and purpose
From the course: Learning Music Notation
The staff: Background and purpose
- [Instructor] Until the creation of music notation systems, music was passed on through an oral tradition. This made sharing music across generations difficult, and over time, music, songs, styles, and their creators were forgotten and lost. Some early notation systems used letters or numbers to represent sound, while European music, which is often referred to as Western music or the Western musical tradition, developed a graphical notation system that primarily used symbols and lines. In any case, for a notation system to be effective, there needs to be a way to indicate or communicate pitch, duration, articulation, and loudness. Let's start by discussing how to notate pitch. So during the ninth and tenth centuries, musicians began to work towards a method of more clearly indicating how much a note or pitch was lower or higher than other notes. In this picture we see here, we see an early staff which consisted of one line. Now that one line is this red line that's going across here…
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