During the next 3 sessions we are going to consider the essential parts of music — the elements of music that are “must haves” — you don’t really have music unless you have these 3 elements at some time or another. They don’t have to all happen at the same time, or all the time, but they are always intermittently present — like the weather.

The first part of music is melody. A melody is a tune, a horizontal flow of notes that generally serves as the basic identifier of a piece of music. On the keyboard we have 12 different notes to work with, and these 12 different notes are repeated in seven different octaves:

Melodies are constructed from these 12 notes, and are almost always derived from a scale of some kind. A scale is simply a row of notes in some consistent pattern. The word “scale” comes from a Latin word meaning “ladder” — notes ascend or descend the ladder rung by rung. There are many types of scales — major, minor (3 varieties of minor), chromatic, whole tone, etc. We will take a look at some of these other types of scales, but the most-used scale is the major scale, which is a row of notes in alphabetical rotation in the following pattern:

Whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step.

A half step is the 2 closest possible keys, such as C and B, and F and E, and B and Bb and C and C#.

A whole step always skips a key — either black or white; such as C and D, D and E, E and F#, and so on.

Tomorrow we’ll look briefly at the 2nd element.