A note’s pitch is represented by where it is located on the musical staff; it will appear on one of the five horizontal lines, on one of the spaces between the lines, or on the ledger lines above or below the staff. When looking a the treble clef staff, the first line represents an E, the first space represents an F, the second line represents a G, and so on. When looking at the musical staff (the music in written form), the notes have higher pitches as they go up and lower pitches as they go down. Those particular notes are played together in order to create chords or played apart to create a melody.

The notes of the musical scale are notated with letters of the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, beginning again with the letter A when playing an octave higher or lower. The naturals are not the only notes; there are also the sharp notes (A#, C#, D#, F#, G#) and the flat notes (Ab, Bb, Db, Eb, Gb). A sharp is a note that is one half step, or a semitone, higher than the natural note that it affects; a flat note is a semitone below it. For example, the note G# is played one semitone, or half step, above a natural G, and a Bb will be played a semitone below a natural B.

Each note or chord is played for a certain count, which is represented by the appearance of the notes on the musical staff. A whole note is held for the entire length of a measure and is represented by an open oval that has no stem. A whole note with a stem is known as a half note, and it lasts for half of a measure. A quarter note is held for one beat in the measure and is depicted as a blackened oval with a stem on it. The stem is connected to a note, and will either point upward or downward on the musical staff, depending on the placement of the note. An eighth note counts for one half of a beat on the staff, and it looks like a quarter note that has an extra flag or tail on its stem. The stems of sixteenth notes have two flags. Eighth or sixteenth notes occasionally appear one right after the other.

If that is the case, they will be joined together with a solid bar that connects the stems where there would otherwise be flags. There are other ways to tie notes together, including ties, slurs, glissandos and triplets. The sound of the music is influenced by them. A note depicted with a slur should be played or sung smoothly, like a solid stroke of a violin’s bow or a singer singing the notes without breathing in between. A glissando refers to a smooth glide through a sequence of notes. When ties are written into music, this adds the time value of two or more notes, while triplets indicate three notes that should be played all in one beat, or in some cases two or more beats. Triplets are often denoted by the number three; this means the three notes should be played so that each note takes the same amount of time.

This is a guest blog (not by Duane)
Further information on music notes and how they work can be found on Wikipedia.