About my musical background.

I first experienced music in my crib singing, which was considered legendary by my family.  My family was a musical family who loved to sing and dance and play their instruments.  My father studied piano and organ until the day he died and my mother was very good on the violin, similar to her young grand daughter, who was very good on her violin, my mother rather gave it up to life, to my grandmother's chagrin.  My mother was never without her violin that she was given at age 10.  It was with her to the day that she died.  "Take it with you."  She would say to me at the end, but I couldn't bare to take it while she lived.

At three I danced Jazz with my brother.  We took from  Leon in a Pasadena, California Dance Studio.
At 8 years old I studied the recorder at public school and in the summer piano, private lessons.
At 10 it was tap dancing at Hollywood Professional School. 
At 12 years of age I studied Ballet with Madam Etienne. Who was in her sixties at the time.
At 13 years I met my friend Beverly Elias who also came from a home of music.  Her father was Lebanese and mother of Jewish descent.  In the evenings we would dance folk dances.  Beverly was studying the Flamenco guitar with an old Spanish man that lived behind our school on Franklin Ave.  I went with her to her lessons with him and she would supplement with added lessons.  She taught me Green Sleeves and House of the Raising Sun.  Eventually we played together and did some performing for our families.   Here we are at Mom's in Malibu, sitting on the patio  strumming away. 

For three years I sang scales with Glenn Raikes.  Then from age 23 to age 28, when my father shipped me the little piano I was singing only religious songs on a weekly basis. The little piano came to us while we were living in the Helman St. house in Ashland, Or.  Olivia was a baby and Jessica was somewhere between kindergarten and the second grade.  After we (Jessica and I) learned the keyboard the way that I am sharing composition in this blog,  Jessica started creating tunes or melodies on the keyboard and writing them out on a score sheet.  Watching her I began to wonder about composers and how they went about writing music.  I would have lived the rest of my life never wondering about them if my girl hadn't written so many lovely tunes!  As an older musician in high school, she went over her early melodies and found them all to written in the key of G major scale.

We moved to the Gresham St. house when Olivia was four years old and Jessica nine or ten.  Both Jessica and I studied piano with Julie Borg for a year or so.  Both girls and myself studied with Virginia Wickham,  Olivia also studied with Jenny and Mrs. Grueling at Lincoln Elementary School.

  Counting time in music is a trick.  We worked ourselves to the 3rd year John Thompson music book. Then we studied violin with Virginia

Eventually, with both girls in school I had the time to return to college.  I had dropped out when I became pregnant with Jessica, in 1970.  My focus was fine art but I squeezed music composition classes in there for about four terms.  I studied with Dr. Belford,  Ellison Glattly and Margaret Evans.  I have composition knowledge up to the fugue, which I love above all others.  But I enjoy that Louisiana sound, having left folk and Flamenco behind, except for on occasion.

I studied violin with Dr. Palmer.


Wendy Schaller (Martin) age16

playing for friends  age 16

The Basic Ingredients.

First, a keyboard is needed.  All the notes are spread out to see and to play.  Later these concepts can be applied to another instrument.  Then a person needs a muffin tin and a pre-A music book.  Cut the letters out, separate them by the segments of the muffin tin and three times a day place them on the corresponding keys on the piano.  The A group having four notes:  A B G F.  The D note group-C D E.  Do this three times a day for one month.  Apply the letters on each octave.  An octave is C to C along the keyboard.  Ours had five at the time.  Each octave has a name, from lowest sounding to the highest sounding octave.https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/beautiful-piano

key board to musical score-a link

When learning the keyboard's relationship to the musical score use colour as a link, in values darkest to lightest.  Lowest sounding octave to highest sounding octave.  Colour the notes on the scale to their corresponding octave.

Each octave has a name.




But, pitch notation is just one way of referencing notes. Each octave, as well as each C, has its own universal name. These are as follows:

• Octave Names (pictured above):
  
  C0 - B0: sub-contra octave (A0 is the lowest pitch on a full piano)
  
  C1 - B1: contra octave
  
  C2 - B2: great octave
  
  C3 - B3: small octave
  
  C4 - B4: one-line octave, or 2nd small octave (contains both middle C and A440)
  
  C5 - B5: two-line octave, or 3rd small octave
  
  C6 - B6: three-line octave, or 4th small octave
  
  C7 - B7: four-line octave, or 5th small octave
  
  C8 - B8: five-line octave, or 6th small octave (C8 is the highest pitch on a full piano)



• Names of the C-Notes:
  
  C0: triple pedal C
  
  C1: double pedal C
  
  C2: pedal C
  
  C3: bass C
  
  C4: middle C
  
  C5: treble C
  
  C6: top C or high C
  
  C7: double top C or double high C
  
  C8: triple top C or triple high C 

 

Counting Time

Counting time means focusing on the concept of time, which is expressed in the music score in the value of the individual notes and signatures,  such as 4/4 meaning each quarter note has one beat and there are four beats to the measure.  2/4 time means 2 beats to the measure, each quarter note getting one beat.  The top number represents how many beats in a measure and the lower number tells what type of note gets one beat.  A quarter note or a half note or an eighth note get one beat in the measure if it is represented as the bottom note in the signature.  The top note tells how many beats are in a measure.

There is also a vocabulary (usually written in Italian).that tells the vocalist or instrumentalist how quickly or slowly or with what feeling the piece or a particular section of the piece was intended to be played.  Some common are.....adagio-slowly...appassionato-passionately...gustoso-with happy emphasis an forcefulness.  There are hundreds.  These are stated in the beginning measure or atop the score or inside.

Take a piece of music from John Thompson 1,  in fact, use the entire book and starting from the beginning, place the music on the table and use a pencil to tap out the time to the entire piece.  One and two and three and four.  Or  one and two and three and one and two and three and-how ever the time signature  at the start of the piece of music tells you to do.  Go to the next John Thompson book, Book 2 and the next.  It makes very good practice.

Notes are of the same value or a different value.  The following copied from Wikipedia.

Note	British name / American name	Rest
	Large (Latin: Maxima) / Octuple whole note (or octuple note)
	Long / Quadruple whole note (or quadruple note)
	Breve / Double whole note (or double note)
	Semibreve / Whole note
	Minim / Half note
	Crotchet / Quarter note
	Quaver / Eighth note For notes of this length and shorter, the note has the same number of flags (or hooks) as the rest has branches.
	Semiquaver / Sixteenth note
	Demisemiquaver / Thirty-second note
	Hemidemisemiquaver / Sixty-fourth note
	Semihemidemisemiquaver / Hundred twenty-eighth note
	Demisemihemidemisemiquaver / Two hundred fifty-sixth note
	Beamed notes Beams connect eighth notes (quavers) and notes of shorter value, and are equivalent in value to flags. In metered music, beams reflect the rhythmic grouping of notes. They may also be used to group short phrases of notes of the same value, regardless of the meter; this is more common in ametrical passages. In older printings of vocal music, beams are often only used when several notes are to be sung on one syllable of the text – melismatic singing; modern notation encourages the use of beaming in a consistent manner with instrumental engraving, and the presence of beams or flags no longer informs the singer. Today, due to the body of music in which traditional metric states are not always assumed, beaming is at the discretion of the composer or arranger and irregular beams are often used to place emphasis on a particular rhythmic pattern.
	Dotted note Placing a dot to the right of a notehead lengthens the note's duration by one-half. Additional dots lengthen the previous dot instead of the original note, thus a note with one dot is one and one half its original value, a note with two dots is one and three quarters, a note with three dots is one and seven eighths, and so on. Rests can be dotted in the same manner as notes. In other words, n dots lengthen the note's or rest's original d duration to .
	Multi-measure rest Indicates the number of measures in a resting part without a change in meter, used to conserve space and to simplify notation. Also called "gathered rest" or "multi-bar rest".

Durations shorter than the 64th are rare but not unknown. 128th notes are used by Mozart and Beethoven; 256th notes occur in works by Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven. An extreme case is the Toccata Grande Cromatica by early-19th-century American composer Anthony Philip Heinrich, which uses note values as short as 2,048ths; however, the context shows clearly^{[original research?]} that these notes have one beam more than intended, so they should really be 1,024th notes.
The name of very short notes can be found with this formula: note, where is the number of flags on the note.

Breaks

	Breath mark In a score, this symbol tells the performer or singer to take a breath (or make a slight pause for non-wind instruments). This pause usually does not affect the overall tempo. For bowed instruments, it indicates to lift the bow and play the next note with a downward (or upward, if marked) bow.
	Caesura Indicates a brief, silent pause, during which time is not counted. In ensemble playing, time resumes when the conductor or leader indicates.