1.2 The 7-note gamut and staff notation

Up to this point, the 7-note gamut has been discussed with the help of letter names, but this information is also conveyed using staff notation. Staff notation is one of the many different ways that musicians around the world have developed to represent sound visually. It emerged relatively recently compared to other systems – in Italy in the early eleventh century – and is generally credited to a musician named Guido of Arezzo (Palisca and Pesce, 2009; Bent et al., 2014). The city of Arezzo can be seen to the southeast of Florence in the map of Italy in Figure 2.

One of the advantages of staff notation is its ability to communicate the octave in which a note is located. Remember that each named note on the keyboard appears in more than one octave: staff notation allows you to specify exactly where a note is located. (You will see later that other notation systems, for instance Sundanese numerical notation, can convey information about the octave in other ways.)

The lower portion of Figure 3 introduces several elements of staff notation. There are two staves (sing. staff, stave), each made up of five horizontal lines and the spaces between them. The staves are joined by a curved bracket in the left-hand margin, indicating that they are to be read together. The bracketed pair of staves is called the grand staff and is widely used in notating music for keyboard instruments.

Each line and each space on the grand staff represents a note that sounds when you play a white key on a keyboard instrument. In this notational system, lower lines and spaces represent keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard and higher ones represent keys on the right. Musicians place oval shapes called noteheads or notes on lines and in spaces to indicate the pitches to be sung or played. Figure 3 contains an ascending series of noteheads, each corresponding to the sound produced by the white key directly above it on the keyboard in the diagram.

The C in the centre of the keyboard in Figure 3 represents middle C, a note near the middle of most keyboard instruments. Observe that it has been notated twice in staff notation, once in the upper staff and once in the lower one. It has been written in both staves using a ledger line, a short line that allows you to incorporate notes that are placed higher or lower than the staff.

The lower of the two staves in the grand staff is the bass staff and is designated as such by the symbol called the bass clef on the left-hand side of the staff. The clef marks the line for the F below middle C (notice the dots on either side of that line). The higher of the two staves is the treble staff; it is designated as such by the symbol called the treble clef on the left-hand side of the staff. This clef marks the line for the G above middle C (notice how the central curl of the clef encircles that line).

Keyboards often extend beyond two octaves, and Figure 4 gives you an even broader picture of the relationship between the keyboard, the notes it produces, and the staff. Notice the more extensive use of ledger lines both above and below the staff.

Many new terms and symbols have been introduced in this section, so you may need to revisit it from time to time if you are new to staff notation. The next activity will help to reinforce some of these new terms.