Revision on Taylor

As already mentioned in the introduction of part 2, I was asked to read through chapters 2: Introduction to Pitch, 4: More Scales, Keys and Clefs ; and 11: Articulation.

I myself had the opportunity to learn about the ins and outs of music theory over the last four years throughout a music- related high-school. Therefore I only saw it as a revision to read to those three chapters. One major difficulty for me though, was and/or is to learn all the technical terms related to music theory in English. ( I was introduced to them in German).

Nevertheless, there were still a few things in chapters 2 and 4 that were new to me, those will be mentioned in the following points.

Chapter 2

• One thing I hadn’t known earlier is, that one is able to write the bass (or “f”) clef the other way round. The most common one is the following :    ;according to Taylor one can also use it as a mirror reflected image, still having the dots at the same place.
• Even though it is not really anything I can make any use of, I found it interesting to hear, that it used to be common, to cancel old key signatures with neutrals before writing down the new key signatures. (This of course excludes C major and a minor, which don’t have any sharps or flats)

Chapter 4

• Something that really surprised me was the description about the minor scales. Taylor mentions the melodic minor scale (where the ascending form sharpens the 6th and the 7th degree, and the descending form doesn’t have any sharps), as well as the harmonic minor scale (where the 7th degree has a sharp in both, ascending and descending, ways). I was amazed, that the natural minor scale was not mentioned. ( This scale is produced by only using the sharps or flats that the minor key signature provides. )

The differences between those three scales can be seen here:

• Taylor also gave information about the names of every single note (or degree) of a scale. I had known about the tonic (1st degree), subdominant (4th degree), dominant (5th degree) and the leading note (7th degree). The fact that every other note in between had its own name, was new to me; The second note of a scale is called supertonic, the third mediant, and the sixth submediant.