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IV. Basic Musical Elements
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A. Note
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- A note is a single pitch of music, e.g., if you strike a single key on the piano, that is one note.
- Notes can be high (right side of the piano keyboard), low (left side of the piano keyboard), or in the "midrange" (middle of the piano keyboard).
- Notes can be played on any instrument or sung by the human voice.
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B. Melody
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- A melody is a group of notes played or sung in succession, e.g., when a song is played or sung, the melody you hear is simply a group of notes one after the other.
- The particular order of notes, as well as the length of each note (i.e., whether it is short, sustains for a long time, or somewhere in between), are what make each melody different and recognizable.
- When you sing a song aloud, or imagine it in your mind, you are most likely singing or imagining the song's melody.
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C. Chord
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- A chord is two or more different notes played at the same time.
- Most instruments (e.g., saxophone, trumpet, trombone, human voice) can only play one note at a time and, therefore, can't play chords; these are referred to as single-note instruments.
- Instruments that can play chords are piano (just strike more than one key simultaneously) and guitar (just strum across more than one string).
- Two or more musicians playing single-note instruments can produce a chord together if they each play a different note at the same time; when they do this, they are producing harmony (singers in choirs do this all the time).
- Chord = Harmony (they are synonymous).
- Chords help depict the music’s emotional content.
- Depending on the particular notes that are played (simultaneously), chords can portray every conceivable emotion, e.g., happy, sad, exciting, mysterious, angry, and many more - even those nuances of emotion for which there are no words (that’s why we have music in the first place: to express emotions that are beyond words).
- Even by changing just one note in a chord (say, from the notes C-E-G to the notes C-Eb-G) can change the emotion depicted by the chord drastically.
- Most chords used in jazz are comprised of 3 to 6 notes.
- Whereas different notes played in succession are called a melody, different chords played in succession are called a chord progression; in jazz (as well as most popular music), melodies are accompanied by a chord progression (a series of chords); for more on chords and chord progressions, as well as aural examples, click below.
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Audio Snippets
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D. Accompaniment
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- Whereas the melody of a song (the most distinguishable part of a song) is what's sung or played "up front," all the music in the background is called the accompaniment.
- The accompaniment consists of all the chords the pianist and/or guitarist play as well as everything else being played behind the melody (what the bassist plays, what the drummer plays, etc.).
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