Music can be so complex and multi-faceted that it’s no wonder that the average person is lost when it comes to a basic understanding of what music is. After all, there are many different classes of classical music alone – from baroque to romantic, from Bach to Bernstein, and everthing in between. Then in jazz there is ragtime, blues, bop, west coast, Kansas City, dixieland — so many different styles all under the broad heading of “jazz”. And who can count the different styles in the world of “popular” music — from rock to country to folk to new age to….on and on.

But no matter what style or genre, all of music can be boiled down to just 3 basic elements: melody (the tune), rhythm, and harmony. If I play melody alone without any rhythm, you probably would not recognize it as a tune — you would think of it as just a meaningless succession of notes. But when I marry it to rhythm, then it becomes recognizeable. And when I add the third element of harmony, then we have “music” as we know and love it.

Watch this 5-minute video on how to learn music from a birdseye view: