What are the elements of music?
Basically, the elements are what makes music, music. The building blocks of music. Right from grade 1, students start to learn these elements, and use them to differentiate, describe, perform, and compose music. Quite often, people have some knowledge of these elements, but not in a logical, organized way.
In Ontario (Canada), the Music Curriculum has students learning about six elements. Other places use 8, or even 10. The ones we focus on are:
Duration includes everything related to length of notes.
- Beat: the steady pulse of the music; like a heart beat, clock tick tock, wiper blades swishing. The beat determines the tempo. It is usually accented with a pattern of strong and weak beats, and this pattern determines the "meter": Strong, weak, weak would indicate a piece with beats grouped into threes. A beat can not be "good" (a favourite reason students give for liking a song), it simply is there. Sometimes we hear the beat through a distinct steady sound, such as when the drums enter after 2 repeats of the bass ostinato in "7 Nation Army" (White Stripes). Sometimes it's implied through the use of accents, such as the guitar entry at 0:18 in "Crazy Train" (Ozzy Osbourne). Students often confuse beat and rhythm, especially with a song like "We Will Rock You" (Queen). What they are hearing with that classic's "stomp stomp clap" is actually a rhythm, and our brains fill in the missing beat 4.
- Rhythm: how the beat is broken down. It is organized into measures (bars) based on the time signature. A time signature is a symbol used in music notation to tell musicians how many beats are in each bar, and what kind of note gets one beat. It is through the examination of rhythms that students learn terms and symbols such as quarter note, half note, eighth notes. We frequently use generic sounds to demonstrate rhythms, such as ta=quarter note (1 beat) and ti-ti=2 eighth notes together. Other systems use more familiar words, such as pie for quarter note, apple for 2 eighth notes. Any theme of words can be applied to rhythm groupings--that is how composers turn lyrics into rhythm! Teachers will often have seasonal variation on their sounds--snowman for ti-ti, snow for ta etc.
- Tempo: is the speed or pace of the music. It is usually expressed as Beats per Minute (BPM) or by an Italian term. Each term covers a range of BPMs as seen in this chart:
If it makes you tap your toes steadily, it's a beat. If you find yourself clapping or whistling it, it's the rhythm (we can, of course, tap a rhythm with our foot, but generally, especially with younger children, we use larger gross motor skills for showing beat--marching, swaying, jumping). Other posts will have more explicit instruction on teaching rhythms; this is just an overview of the elements.
- Pitch: the position of a single sound within the spectrum of sounds humans can hear
- Melody: a series of sounds and silences moving through time. Can move by step, skip (big or small jumps), or stay the same pitch. We use a 5 lined "staff" to show these pitches.
The musical alphabet is A-G (and it repeats), and we can also use solfege, or, doh re mi fa so la ti do. When a pitch meets a rhythm, they become a melody! - Interval: the distance between two pitches. They can be sounding at the same time (Harmonic) or sounding one after another (Melodic). They are given names based on their relation to the first note of the scale they are being compared to. They can be major, minor, perfect or octave. More on this in the intervals post.
- Scale: A sequence of notes based on a specific pattern. As mentioned above, many people are familiar with doh re mi, etc. This is a major scale. There can also be minor scales, and many other patterns based on specific intervals. Each type of scale can be built on every pitch. In non-Western music, there are many other ways to unite pitches in an organized way, but this blog is about what we teach in Ontario, Canada.
- Dynamics: How loud or quiet the music is. Some teachers say "soft" instead of loud, but many feel "soft" is a material texture. Again, we use Italian terms for dynamics.
- Articulations: We don't have a handy chart for articulations as it's not as simple as getting more or less articulated. Articulation means how a note is attacked, shaped, and ended. If all the notes in a passage are to be started gently, and held for full value and no gaps between notes, we call this legato. If the notes blend from one into another (without starting each note with the tongue), it is called slurred (think of singing a series of vowels with no consonants). If notes are shortened and separated from their neighbours, they are staccato. There are also accents (marcato) which tell you to put emphasis on the start of the note to make it stand out
Timbre is the element that relates to the unique quality of sounds that allows us to distinguish between them. It is also known as tone colour. It is what makes a trumpet sound like a trumpet and different than a flute. To help us with that, we can classify instruments in different ways. For example, we can classify how the instrument makes the sound--strike, blown, strum; or by their instrument family--woodwinds, brass, percussion. Composers will usually choose certain instruments because of the sound quality of the instrument. A fanfare introducing a special guest would not have the same impact if performed on the flute instead of a trumpet.
- monophony: a single melodic line with no accompaniment, or with all voices being on the same pitch (unison)
- homophony: a single melodic line with accompaniment that moves together
- polyphony: multiple melodic lines performed at the same time
Understanding the roots of the words (mono=1, homo=same, poly=multiple) helps, as does this little video
Form is the structure of the composition. Each different section is assigned a letter (ABC...). Sections often repeat in a song and if it's almost the same with maybe a slight difference, we can add a superscript numeral to indicate the variation. Some composers use ' and '' instead, and they are called "primes". For example A B A' B A'' C is read as A, B, A prime, B, A double prime, C.
Some patterns occur frequently and are part of the curriculum:
- binary A B
- ternary A B A
- rondo A B A C A (also A B A B A); there are five parts and 1, 3, 5 are the same.
Those are the six elements of music as addressed in the Ontario curriculum. This is a lot of material the students are expected to learn (scaffolded for each grade), however, NONE of the Overall Expectations are about actually evaluating the specific elements outlined for each grade. OE C1 Creating and Performing states "apply the creative process....to create and perform music for a variety of purposes, using the elements and techniques of music" (the Overall Expectations are the same for each grade). This is the closest you get to having to report on the students' knowledge of the elements (as per the Growing Success document, we report on the Overall Expectations, not Specific Expectations. The SE are to be accounted for in the instruction and assessments of students, but the Formal Evaluations is of the OE).
What this has meant for music instruction in Ontario is that many students are not getting the instruction of the elements like they should. Ontario has no requirement that music teachers be music specialists and thus, very often students receive music instruction from their main teacher, or from a prep coverage teacher, who might have no music experience. That might be you even! It is my hope with this blog, and my products in my TPT store, to help non-musical music teachers in Ontario. It can be daunting to open up the curriculum guide to Grade 5 Music and see that students need to learn about dotted eighth notes and you have no idea what that means. Music notation is a secret code, but we want everyone to learn it, including you! It's really not too complex when you break it down, and never be afraid to let students know you are learning too. In the coming weeks, I will be adding more blog posts about the elements in greater detail. If you have any questions, leave me a comment, a message on Instagram or an email at ontteachertracy @ gmail dot com.
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