Reading notes

About this course

The treble clef began life as a letter. In medieval chant books, scribes wrote a letter such as G, F or C at the start of a line to show which pitch that line stood for. These key letters were copied by hand for centuries, and the shapes gradually became decorated and stylised until the G turned into the curling sign we draw today. If you look closely, you can still see a G hidden in the loop around the second line. The treble clef curls around the second line from the bottom, which is G above middle C.

The eight units start with treble clef lines and spaces, then the bass clef, where two dots sit on either side of the F line. Ledger lines and middle C come next. Ledger lines became common in the early 1500s in keyboard music, though printers disliked setting each little line in metal type. The grand staff joins a treble staff and a bass staff with one brace, with middle C in the gap between them. Sharps, flats and naturals follow: a sharp raises a note by one half step. A unit on note names in other systems explains that what an English book calls B is H in a German score. The last two units read a short melody and practise sight-reading, where the first eight notes of "Frère Jacques" use only three pitches, C, D and E.

The syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la come from an eleventh-century Italian monk, Guido of Arezzo, who used a hymn to Saint John in which each half-line starts one step higher. Every unit has a staff quiz or a keyboard you can play.