At your table discuss the following then choose a person to share your answers with the class
What kind of score markings can you think of?
How do we know the way in which a composer wants us to play his/her music?
It’s easy if a musician performs his/her own music, but what if the composer and the performer never meet?
What if the performer lives several hundred years after the composer and wants to be as faithful as possible to the composer’s intentions?
In addition to the notes and the rests, the composer puts in directions for the musician to follow. These are a mixture of words and symbols, and can include, for example:
Breaks and pauses in the music
Dynamics such as loud (f), soft (p), an accent (sfz), getting louder (crescendo), or getting softer (diminuendo)
Speeding up (accelerando) and slowing down (ritardando)
Articulation marks such to indicate the note is shortened (staccato), emphasized (accent) or held (tenuto)
That one note is played very quickly before the main note is played (acciaccatura)
Tempo markings such as slow (largo), at a walking pace (Andante), lively (Allegro) or Fast (presto)
Time signatures – e.g. 2/4, 3/4 or 4/4
In pairs, look at the opening eight bars of Piano Sonata No. 1, by Beethoven, Germany (1795).
How many markings are there?
What information do they convey?
Are the composer’s intentions clear and easy to understand?
The first 9 bars of Piano Sonata No. 8 (Pathétique Sonata), by Beethoven, Germany (1798).
The score below contains 12 mistakes. All the notes are correct, but 12 markings are incorrect - listening to the recording and reading the score can you work out the mistakes?
● How many incorrect markings can you spot in score below?
● How could mistakes like these change the information, and therefore the intentions that are being shared?
● In what ways can this ultimately make the music less effective?
Figure 3. The first 9 bars of Piano Sonata No. 8 (Pathétique Sonata), by Beethoven, Germany (1798) with correct markings.
Now that you know the 'basic code' you can start thinking about the ways in which musicians use Music to encode secrets, ideas, and just fun stuff. Many composers found ways of writing their name into the music - but there are some who went further. Can you find work out the code?
Compose a short melody using the ciphers above to help encode a short joke.
4.01 Know that the study of music is concerned with musical expression and communication
4.02 Know the uses of the elements of music
4.06 Be able to use music vocabulary and apply the elements of music to analyse and describe musical forms
4.07 Be able to interpret standard notation symbols
4.10 Be able to create or compose short pieces within specified parameters
4.11 Be able to perform a repertoire of music, alone or with others, paying attention to performance practice, breath control, posture and tone quality