My Color Music

Can you name this face?

I’ll give you three hints …

1. He wrote hundreds of songs over his lifetime
2. He lived from 1888 to 1989 (101 years!)
3. His real name was Israel Isidore Baline

That’s right, we’re talking about Irving Berlin. As a songwriter, he was one of the best … composing classics like “White Christmas,” “God Bless America,” “Easter Parade,” Happy Holidays,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” The guy was truly talented. And some would even say he was inspired.

But Berlin himself said that he didn’t believe in “inspiration.” Instead, he said his best songs were the “result of work.” In fact, it was a ritual for Berlin to write a complete song (both words and music) every day. He took music seriously … and he came up with some good stuff.

What’s really amazing about Irving Berlin’s songwriting is that he played everything in the key of F#. Because that was the only key he learned to play, his fingers were always set to that position. F# was his tonic note and he stuck with it.

He even bought a “transposing piano” that let him change the key of his songs using special levers and gears. He called it his “trick piano,” and he took it with him everywhere he went—including on vacation cruises with his family.

Of course, with Color Music, it’s easy for us to play in any key we’d like. (After all, each key works in the exact same way.) But hey … even with his limited skills at actually playing an instrument, Irving Berlin was brilliant. For example, check out this video of Fred Astaire performing Berlin’s classic number, “Puttin’ On The Ritz.”

So … music is all about time. And that’s why we need a way of showing exactly how long each note should last. In music notation, we can do this by using special duration symbols—which are simple because they basically follow the beat of a song.

For example, the song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” includes four beats in each measure … with a separate note for every beat. Try playing this pattern to see how the notes follow a simple beat of 1, 2, 3, 4 … 1, 2, 3, 4 … and so on.

In this melody, the notes that last for just one beat are called “quarter notes.” And that’s because each note fills 1/4—or one quarter—of a measure. Get it? Quarter notes are probably the most common type of note in music. And they’re easy to play because each is written as a simple “note head” with a little line attached called a “stem.”

Depending on how high or low a note sounds, this stem line might point up or down. But either way, each quarter note lasts for the same amount of time. For example, try playing through the following pattern to hear how these notes sound … with one quarter note per beat. (If it helps, count the beats as you play.)

Of course, we can also play notes that last for longer or shorter amounts of time. And these different notes are easy to play, too. For example, let’s say we want to make each note last for two beats instead of just one. What would we do?

Well, instead of playing quarter notes, we’d use what are called “half notes.” With four beats per measure, each half note fills half a measure. And that’s why they’re called “half notes.” Get it? Half notes look a lot like quarter notes … only the note head is hollow.

We can see the half note in action in our favorite new melody “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Remember how the last notes in measures two and four get two beats each? We simply show this using half notes.

So now that we know how to play quarter notes AND half notes, what other options do we have? Well, the answer is … many. In fact, we can even play notes that last for all the beats in a measure. And we do this using “whole notes”—because they last for (you guessed it) a whole measure. Try playing through this pattern of whole notes to get a feel for how they sound. Each one is written as a big hollow note head without any stem.

Whole notes sound nice because they last for several beats. But what if we wanted to play notes with a very short duration, too? Can we also play notes that last for, say, less than one beat? The answer, of course, is yes.

For example, a lot of songs include what are called “eighth notes,” which last for just half a beat. With four beats in a measure, we can fit eight of these notes into that measure. And that’s why they’re called eighth notes. Get it? Eighth notes look similar to quarter notes. But to tell them apart, each eighth note has a little “flag” attached to the stem. It’s simple, really. To follow the beat, we count them as “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and” … etc.

Because these flags can get a little distracting (when a song includes a lot of eighth notes), musicians sometimes connect these notes with “beams” instead. To see what I mean, try playing through this same pattern again. Only this time, notice how some of the eighth notes are connected by beams. Nothing has changed about their duration, though. Just like before, each of these notes lasts for the same amount of time.

If we want to play notes with an even shorter duration, we simply add more flags (or beams) to the note stems. For example, notes with two flags (or two beams) are twice as short as eighth notes. And they’re called “sixteenth notes” because 16 of these notes fit into one measure with four beats. To follow the beat with sixteenth notes, we count them as   “1  e and a  2  e and a  3  e and a  4  e and a” … etc.

Of course, we could just keep going … making notes with even shorter duration. But you get the point. What’s really important is that music notation is totally flexible in illustrating time.

So to summarize, the following is a basic breakdown of how notes can follow the beats in a measure. Along with pitch—that is, the 12 notes of the chromatic scale—these are the next most useful things to know in music. And don’t worry, we’ll be looking at duration a lot coming right up. So by the time we’ve played through a few more melodies, we’ll be a bunch of musical geniuses.

As an art form, music is pretty unique. It’s unlike painting, sculpture, architecture, glasswork—and a bunch of other kinds of art—for one big reason. It takes time to unfold and make sense. Unlike other art forms, music must have time to work its way from beginning to end.

To put it another way, it’s easy to experience something like the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David in an instant. The moment we see this kind of art, our brains understand it.

But with music, a song needs time to expand and move forward. It’s kind of cool that way. Music is time … and time is music. So if time stood still, the world would be silent.

Because music is all about time, we obviously need a way to illustrate it in music notation. And just as you might expect, musicians have already come up with a clever way of doing just that. Using “duration” symbols, we can show—in detail—exactly how a song should sound.