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
Rhythm
You may already have a good idea of what rhythm is — it's the way music moves and grooves. To convey a more formal definition of rhythm, let's familiarize ourselves with a few concepts:
- The beatThe pulse in a piece of music. is the pulse we feel in the music.
Slow Tempo
- TempoA term that refers to how quickly the beats pass in a piece of music. refers to the speed of the beat, i.e., how fast the beats pass.
Fast Tempo
Beat
- A note is an actual musical sound, consisting of pitch but also durationA term referring to how long a note is sounded. (i.e., how long the note is sounded).
RhythmIn a piece of music, the series of articulated durations from one note to the next. is created by the notes we hear. Think of a tune — it is a succession of notes. We primarily associate a note with its pitch, but for purposes of understanding rhythm, let's focus on the note's duration. Rhythm is the succession of articulated durations from one note to the next.
Our bodies and brains make sense of the rhythms we hear because we feel the beat in the background behind the music. In other words, the beat provides the context that allows us to make sense of the rhythm.
Not only do we feel the beat, we also sense how the beats are grouped because the first beat in each group is emphasized. The way the beats are grouped speaks to the next concept that we'll cover, meterThe grouping of beats in a piece of music.
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The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been referred to as the basic miracle of music, the use of which is common in most musical systems.
