Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Music Lessons: Lesson #1 The Language of Music

Back in the 70’s I remember occasionally watching an early Sunday morning children’s program called Marshall Efron’s Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School. I have borrowed the program title because it articulates well the approach I like to take when teaching people how to read music. Reading music is a skill anyone can learn. Many people are intimidated by music notation and therefore feel uncomfortable about participating in music. The more comfortable our congregation is with reading music the more confident we will be in singing.

The best way to approach learning to read music is to accept several basic facts up front. First, you have to accept the fact that written music is a language. No one person sat down and developed our system of written music. Think about it, no one is that psychotic. Music notation developed over a long period of time. Second, since music is a language, like most languages it has some really weird, illogical, inefficient, confusing and seemingly pointless elements which you have to just accept. Back in elementary school you may have asked your teacher how can “through, tough, bough, though, and thought” all sound different but are all spelled with ‘ough’? She probably gave you the all inspiring and informative answer, “Because that’s the way it is.” This is also the answer to the same sort of questions when it comes to learning to read music. The third and most important fact you must accept is this. No matter how good your ideas to improve music notation may be, no one is going to rewrite the 1200 or so years worth of notated music we have to accommodate your improvements. Besides, that’s the way it is.

The earliest music writing involved making marks to indicate the rise and fall of pitch. For instance a gifted bard may have wanted to share this portion of a song with a fellow musician.

As you see, this only conveys a general idea of how the melody should go. In later developments a line was probably added to indicate the beginning pitch for the song.


Over time more lines were added to indicate more specific information for pitch. Eventually 5 lines came to be accepted as the norm.

The pattern of five lines and four spaces came to be called the music staff. No, I don’t know why. That’s just the way it is.



During the same time that the staff was developing, the accepted music scale was also developing. Letters came to be used to indicate names for the notes. As we ascend through pitches we use the seven letters “A” through “G” to identify the notes, and then we start back over with “A” through “G” again. The music staff provides us with five lines and four spaces. That gives us nine levels where pitches can be represented. But, we needed a way to mark which line was which pitch. Some brilliant, well intentioned person decided we needed to place a symbol on the staff that would identify the second line from the bottom of the staff as the note “g”.

This is what the symbol they drew on the staff looked like. They called it the G cleff. You will notice that the G cleff symbol makes a crosshair on the second line from the bottom of the staff pointing out that line as “G”. The space above would be “A”, the line above that “B”, etc. The space below “G” would of course be “F”, the line below that “E”, etc.

Since there are a lot more than just eight or nine pitches used in most music we needed to be able to show more than is possible on the G cleff. Someone had a brilliant idea to take another music staff, put another cleff sign on it and let it represent another set of nine notes. This cleff marks the second line from the top of the staff as the note “F”. You’ll never believe what we call it. Yep, that’s right. This is the F cleff.

When we pair up these two sets of music staffs we make what is known as the Grand Staff. Between, over, and under the staff additional pitches can be represented as needed by drawing very short “imaginary” lines called ledger lines. In the hymnal you have noticed the words of the hymn are written between these staffs. The G cleff has the higher sounding notes played with the right hand on the piano or organ. In a choir like ours, these notes are sung usually by the ladies of the choir. The F cleff indicates the lower sounding notes played with the left hand on the keyboards, and sung by the men’s voices in the choir.

These are some very basic foundational ideas in the development of music notation. None of what we have covered is earth shattering and none of it will make any of us the next contestant on American Idol. I do hope, however, that when you open your hymnal this Sunday, instead of seeing a bunch of decorative lines above and below the text of the hymn, you will begin to see the language of music and begin to recognize some of its elements. We will continue to build on these ideas each month. There you have music illustrated, simplified, and painless. Why? Because, that’s the way it really is.