Overview
Welcome to OnMusic Jazz!
Although this course does not expect you to learn to read or play music, or require previous music experience, basic familiarity with music fundamentals and essential jazz concepts will most likely give you a good head start and enhance your learning experience.
With that in mind, this section presents a broad overview of basic music elements such as the keyboard, scales, pitch, rhythm, meter, and form, on which to some of essential features and the sounds of jazz, including improvisation and swing feeling. We will also cover the defining characteristics of blues music, how the unique sounds of blues originated, how these sounds were absorbed into jazz, and some of the differences between blues and jazz.
These lessons will be especially beneficial if you don’t have basic musical or jazz knowledge, but they can also be valuable even if you already have both. The goal is to offer you the information and tools that will let you become familiar.
Objectives
Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to do the following:
- Distinguish sharp notes from flat notes
- Identify keys on a keyboard that are a half-step or whole step apart
- Define an octave
- Describe some basic scales
- Recognize on the musical staff the clef, time signature, notes, and measures
- Define beat, tempo, note, rhythm, and meter
- Distinguish among simple meters such as duple, triple, and quadruple
- Define pickup
- Define syncopation
Pitch
The placement of notes on the staff indicates pitchA term referring to how high or low a note sounds.: the higher up that the note is place on the staff, the higher its pitch will be. Conversely, the lower a note is placed, the lower its pitch will be.
Note Placement on the Staff
As the above exercise demonstrates, each line and space on the staff corresponds directly to a pitch — and therefore to a key on the keyboard. Try it for yourself — click on the lines and spaces of the grand staff, or on the keys of the piano keyboard, to see the one-to-one correlation.
The Staff and the Keyboard
The staff and the keyboard
The notion of an octave is fairly universal--and there are a lot of psychophysical explanations for this--but many music traditions, e.g., Indian classical music, divide the octave very differently from the West..
