Introduction to Music

An introduction to the theory of music, including notation and the foundations of key, harmony and tonality.

Music is a language, and like any other language, it has a way of writing it down, spelling, punctuation and all those grammatical things that languages have; and of course, it also has an enormous, and enormously pleasurable, literature.

If you couldn’t read and write in your native language, you might be able to get along in everyday life, but you’d have to rely on audiotapes, films and film adaptations for any literature. It’s the same with music. You can get by just listening to your favourite records without understanding them, but if you’re really interested, you want to be able to read and write music and to know what’s going on.

This paper introduces you to the dots and squiggles and what they mean, and it looks at how music is put together: what notes are available; how you make tunes out of them; and how you put other notes with them to make harmony.