COMPOSITION
By Matt2jones

Dun - DeDunDun

Part III - The Score

Okay, after the RAVING SUCCESS of the first installment (Ie. No-one told me I fucked up) I return with the more practical and vocational section of Leaving Cert Music: Composition - Writing music.

First, to recap on last month, we learned that there are 11 notes, repeated on and on towards, but never reaching, infinity.  We learned that the first note of a song is called the Key, and it dictates the notes that can follow pleasantly afterwards.  We learned the how to find the notes in the Key of Any note you choose by means of the 'stencil' analogy (remember, skip one, skip one, etc... ?).  And finally we learned how to find notes that will sound pleasing to the ear when played at the same time via Chords.  At least that was the important stuff.  What you didn't learn was how to do ANYTHING AT ALL with the knowlage.  That's what this installment is to redress.

The conventional method for writting music oft referred to as Scores, Sheet Music, 'The Stave', and undoubtably many other blandular words, but it has been perfected over the years so it's realy quite effective for writing music so that's what I'm going to teach you to use (tongue having been bionicaly implanted into cheek many years previously...).

You will notice that the Nature of the Stave eliminates the need to worry, or indeed know about, the fiddly technical 'low level' bits I explained previously, like how many semi tones between each note in a key, or Chord, so it should agree with the more vocational, practical, and the the guys who like OOP and continuously jabber 'Classes are great because you don't need to know Anything...'  Sorry, its my problem, I'll deal with it....

For our 'intensive' purposes this is the medium inwhich your music shall be written:

The curly thing on the left is called the 'Clef', this particular one being the 'Treble Clef'.  When you see this symbol it tells you the following:

The first (aka BOTTOM) of the five lines represents the note E
The fifth (aka TOP) of the five lines represents the note F, which is one note and one octave HIGHER in pitch then the E located on the first (aka BOTTOM) line.

That is what you are to think every time you see the treble clef.

From the First (AKA Bottom) line, to the Fifth (AKA Top) Line the Notes are:
E, G, B, D, F
There are many helpful acronyms to help you remember these.  Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit, Every Great Bum Dies Fucked, Every Gay Bum Dies Fucked, they aren't hard to invent, but thanks to my own personal, ingenious, observations, you won't need to resort to this primitive level.

You see the spaces between the lines also represent notes, and those notes are (from the first space (aka the space above the bottom line)) to the fourth space (aka the space below the top line):
F, A, C, E
For some reason there are no helpful rhymes to aid commiting this sequence to memory.

But, in steps the mightly M2J, there is an easier way to remember them!  And it is as follows:
Combine the two sequences in order, from botom line, to the adjacent space, the who way up, and you get:
E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F
Look familiar?

Now here is where you are to apreciate the wonders and ease of use of 'The Score System':

As you should be able to tell, all the above notes are notes in the Key of C.  So if you are writing music in the Key of C, you could, hypotheticly, write a note on any one of those lines or spaces and it would sound okay.  You wouldn't even have to think, just drop your pen on the five lines and where-ever it landed everything would be cool.

Now, lets examin the Key of G for a while.
	The key of G consists of:
G, A, B, C, D, E, F#
(Remember the method last month to work that out)

Now, this is mostly the same as the Key of C, so if we were writing sheet music in the Key of G via a falling pen, the music would sound okay, as long as it didn't hit the fifth line, which represents F, which is not in the key of G.
	Lets examine the difference between the two Keys of C and G again.  Aside from them both starting on different notes, there is only ONE difference, and that is there is an F, and an F# in the key of G.  Now, we have a system that can cater for the key of C quite well, and if there's only one note, only one semitone for christsakes, keeping us from using it for the key of G aswel, so what do we do.
	Well, I think the obvious solution would be to put a mark on the Line that represents F, to indicate that whenever this note is played, you play F# instead instead of F.  And thats exactly what you do.  The "Key Signature" for the Key of G is:

In a Concise....Wrong Nutshell they Key Signature is the combination of Sharps (#'s) and Flats (b's) that follow the Clef, which 'configures' the five lines to be in a certain key.  You follow?  If not, email me :-P
	There will be a list of Keys and Key signatures at the end of the Chapter.

Okay, so we've covered the Cleft, what it is, and the Key Signatures, but whats up with the 4/4 in between them?  Well, this describes the rhythm the song will be written in.  The Top number is the amount of Beats-in-the-Bar, which is hard to explain unless you already know what I'm talking about, suffice it is to say, leaving it at four will do fine for now.  The bottom number is even more technical, it describes which of the musical Symbols will be used for one 'beat'.  So 4/4 means there will be four one quater beats per bar.
	We will be fucking around with time signatures (the 4/4 thing) later, but for the moment this brings us nicely into the next section...

Part IV - Rhythm

Lets examine this peice of music here.  What can we tell about it?
	Well first up, the lack of any #'s or b's mean this is written in the Key of C.  Second, we can tell by the Trebel Clef that the notes, from bottom line to top line, are E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F.  From this we can deduce that the first note of the Peice is a C (Which makes sense since this is in the Key of C...).
	Now, we know that this is in 4/4 time, but what does that actually tell us?

To Understand this fully we're going to need to know the values of the Notes Rhythmically (?spell anyone?).

The Crotchet:

In x/4 time this is the note that represents one 'beat' of the bar, because a Crotchet is a Quater (1/4) note.  The Rule is if the Bottom number of the time signature is a 4, then a Crotchet = 1 Beat.

The Quaver:

Quavers are one eighth of a note (1/8), and so any note written as a quaver should last half as long as a note written as a Crotchet.  In 4/4 time Quavers are paired together with a line joining the stems, one pair of which = 1 Beat.

The Minum:

Any note written as a Minum lasts twice as long as a note written as a Crotchet, and in 4/4 time one minum = 2 beats.

Don't worry if you don't get what the fuck I'm on about, I'm now going to go through it all in Patronising Detail:

Okay, the first note is a Crotchet, and it is written on the third space, which is C, so the peice will begin with the Note C being played for one 'beat' (an undefined yet constant length of time, say, half a second?), and then followed by the Note E, which is a Quaver, so played for half the time the Crotchet was played for (which would be a quater of a second in this case), then Followed by the Note F, again a quaver, so played for the same length of time for the previous note.
	Now, this is 4/4 time, which has four beats in a bar, and we said a Crotchet counts for 1 beat, and a quaver counts for a half (a pair counting for 1) beat, so that means we are 2 beats into the first bar, with a total of 4 beats to go through, so we should be half way.  Making sense?
	Next is another Quaver, on the note of A, so again, we play it for one half beat, and next another
quaver, on G, another half beat, and finaly, at the end of the Bar, a Crotchedt on E, to be played for one beat.
	So lets tally up the scores:
	
	4 		.... beats in the bar
	4		.... 1/4 note = 1 beat		....  4 x 1/4 = one bar

	From the start:
		1/4 + 1/8+1/8 + 1/8+1/8 + 1/4 = 1 = 4 x 1/4 = one bar

Yay!  We have one bar played.

Do you have a better grasp on it now?

Okay, now take a look at the last note in the peice, 'The Minum'.  This lasts for 2 beats, as you can see from above, and, as a rule of thumb, heralds the end of a 'Phrase'.  A Phrase is like a musical sentence (I hate analogies like that but its all I can think of), its a peice of music with a beginning, middle and end, made of up a certain number of bars.  The music peice is made up of a load of Phrases, each with,  generaly speaking, the same number of bars per Phrase.
	So in this case we have a four bar Phrase, with four beats to the bar (ie. 4/4 time), which is all very symetrical and divisable and binary.

Right, I was going to start talking on actually writing music at this point, but today is the submition deadline, and, looking back, I'm still on the schedual I'd planned, so we'll call it a day (/month...) and next month, I SWEAR I'll teach you how to write music.

M2j