Reading a score

A real score contains notes that belong to no chord and marks that are not notes at all, and this lesson closes the gap between the theory built so far and a printed page.

Notes that belong to no chord

Take a bar whose harmony is plainly C major and whose melody runs C, D, E. The D is in no C major triad, and yet nothing sounds wrong. It is a non-chord tone, and once you can name the six common types you can strip a melody down to its harmony in a single pass.

A passing tone fills the gap between two chord tones a third apart, moving by step in one direction and continuing in the same direction: C, D, E, with D the passing tone. It normally falls on a weak beat.

A neighbour tone steps away from a chord tone and back to it: C, D, C is an upper neighbour, C, B, C a lower one. Also usually weak.

A suspension is the one that lands on a strong beat, and it has three stages. A note is sounded as part of one chord (preparation), held while the harmony changes underneath so that it becomes a dissonance (suspension), then falls by step into the new chord (resolution). Suspensions are named by the intervals above the bass, so the commonest is the 4 to 3. They are the main way European music creates a dissonance where it wants to be noticed.

An anticipation is the mirror image: a note of the next chord arrives early, over the old harmony, usually just before a cadence. An appoggiatura is leapt into and resolves by step, on a strong beat, so it sounds like a suspension that arrived without preparation. An escape tone does the opposite, stepping away from a chord tone and then leaping.

The classification is entirely a matter of how the note is approached and how it is left, so the procedure is mechanical: look at the note before and the note after, and check whether each move is a step or a leap and whether the note is metrically strong or weak.

Example. A bar is harmonised with F major (F A C). The melody plays A, G, F, E, F in eighth notes, starting on beat 1. Which notes are non-chord tones, and of what kind?

The chord tones are F, A and C. So G and E are the outsiders. G, on the second eighth, is approached by step down from A and left by step down to F, so it is a passing tone. E, on the fourth eighth, steps down from F and steps back up to F, so it is a lower neighbour tone. Both fall on weak eighths, which is what the labels predict.

Now you. A bar is harmonised with G major (G B D) over a G bass. The melody holds a C on beat 1, tied over from the previous bar, then moves to B on beat 2 and D on beat 3. Name the non-chord tone and its type.

Loudness and attack

Marks for loudness and for attack control what the notes sound like, and neither family is precise.

Dynamics are relative. The letters run pp, p, mp, mf, f, ff, from soft to loud, with ppp and fff at the extremes, and they mean nothing in decibels: an f on a solo flute and an f in an orchestral tutti are worlds apart. Gradual change is written cresc. and dim., or drawn as opening and closing hairpins. Sudden marks include sf for a single stabbed note and fp, loud then immediately soft.

Articulation says how each note begins and ends. A dot above the note is staccato, detached, roughly half its written length. A short horizontal line is tenuto, held for full value and slightly leaned on. An arrowhead is an accent, a wedge is marcato. A slur asks for its notes to be joined, which on a wind instrument literally means one breath and no re-tonguing. A fermata, the eye-shaped mark, means hold the note longer than written, and how much longer is the conductor's decision.

Tempo words

Tempo words are older than metronome marks and vaguer. In rough order of speed: largo around 40 to 60 beats per minute, adagio 66 to 76, andante 76 to 108 (it means "walking"), moderato 108 to 120, allegro 120 to 168, presto 168 to 200. Treat those numbers as a modern convention rather than a fact, since editions disagree with each other and with Maelzel's original table, and since the words were understood as characters before they were understood as speeds: allegro means cheerful, not fast. Changes are marked rit. or rall. to slow down, accel. to speed up, a tempo to return.

The shape of a score, and the parts that lie

An orchestral score stacks its staves in a fixed order, top to bottom: woodwind, then brass, then percussion, then any keyboard or voices, then strings. Within each family the highest instrument is on top, and the order never changes, so a conductor knows where to look without reading the labels.

The trap is that many parts are written in a different key from the one they sound. A transposing instrument is one whose written C produces some other pitch, and the reason is fingering: a clarinettist who learns one set of fingerings can then play a B flat, an A or an E flat clarinet from parts that all look the same. The commonest are the B flat instruments, clarinet and trumpet, which sound a major second below what is written; the horn in F, a perfect fifth below; the alto saxophone in E flat, a major sixth below; and the tenor saxophone in B flat, a major ninth below. Piccolo sounds an octave above and double bass an octave below, which are transpositions too, if trivial ones.

Two rules keep this straight. To go from written to sounding, transpose down by the instrument's interval. To go from sounding to written, transpose up. And a transposing part carries its own key signature: with the orchestra in C major, a B flat clarinet part is written in D major, two sharps, because everything it reads is a tone higher than it sounds.

Example. A B flat trumpet plays a written D5. What pitch sounds, and what would the trumpet have to read to sound a concert F4?

Written to sounding is down a major second, so a written D5 sounds C5. Sounding to written is up a major second, so to produce a concert F4 the player must read G4.

Now you. A horn in F reads a written C5. What sounds? And what must an alto saxophone read to sound a concert E flat 4?

Eight bars, analysed from nothing

Here is a chorale-style phrase in G major, 4/4, its melody four quarter notes to a bar, its bass one or two notes, and its inner voices left as chord names. Nothing has been analysed yet.

Start with the key. The signature would be one sharp, and the piece begins and ends on G with F sharps throughout, so it is G major rather than E minor. The diatonic triads are therefore G, Am, Bm, C, D, Em and F# diminished, numbered I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi and vii°.

Now the numerals, chord by chord. Bar 1 is G, so I. Bar 2 is C then D, so IV then V. Bar 3 is Em then Am, so vi then ii. Bar 4 is D, so V, and it lasts a whole bar and ends the phrase: that is a half cadence, and it means bars 1 to 4 form an antecedent, a musical question.

Bar 5 begins again on I, then reaches A7, which is not in G major at all, since it contains C sharp. Its root A is degree 5 of D and the C sharp is D's leading note, so it is the dominant seventh of the dominant, V7/V, tonicising the D that arrives in bar 6. Bar 6 is V, turning into V7 in its second half by adding C. Bar 7 does not resolve that V7 to I: it goes to Em, vi, so bars 6 to 7 make an interrupted cadence. The rest of bar 7 is Am, ii.

Bar 8 is the real ending. G/D is a G chord with D in the bass, second inversion, so I6/4, sitting on a strong beat above the dominant bass note. It resolves into D7, V7, and then to G, I: a cadential six-four followed by a perfect cadence. The six-four is not really a tonic chord, since B and G above the D bass are a sixth and a fourth resolving down to A and F sharp, a fifth and a third, which is a pair of suspensions over the dominant.

Finally the melody, where almost every note is a chord tone and the exceptions are the interesting ones. The E5 on beat 2 of bar 1 steps up from D5 and back to it, an upper neighbour. The B4 on beat 2 of bar 2, over a C chord, is a passing tone between C5 and A4, and the E5 on beat 2 of bar 4 passes between F sharp 5 and D5. The C sharp 5 ending bar 5 is a chord tone of A7 behaving as a leading note, and it rises to D5. The C5 on beat 3 of bar 6 is the seventh of D7 and duly falls to B4 at the start of bar 7.

The whole thing is a period: two four-bar phrases, the first ending in a question and the second answering it, which is the commonest eight-bar shape in the repertoire. Written out compactly, the analysis is: I, IV, V, vi, ii, V, I, V7/V, V, V7, vi, ii, I6/4, V7, I.

Example. In that excerpt, why is the A7 in bar 5 written with a C sharp rather than a D flat?

Because spelling records function. The note is the leading note of D and rises a semitone to it, so it must be written as a raised C, and a D flat would say that the note falls to C. The two sound identical in equal temperament and mean opposite things on the page.

Now you. Suppose bar 8 were changed so that the last chord were Em instead of G. What would the final cadence be called, and what would the melody's last note, G4, be doing?

What the analysis will not tell you

Everything above is worth doing and none of it is a theory of music. Four limits are worth carrying away.

Roman-numeral analysis is descriptive. It reports what a passage does in the vocabulary of one style. It does not say why the piece is good, does not generate a next chord, and applied to the wrong repertoire it produces labels that are technically correct and musically empty.

Analysis is not unique. Choosing which notes are structural and which are decoration is a judgement, and competent analysts disagree, most often about whether a chord is a real harmony or a by-product of passing notes. Bar 8's six-four is a mild case: it can be read as a tonic chord in second inversion or as a decorated dominant, and this lesson picked the second reading because of how it resolves.

The theory was built from a narrow sample. Its rules are generalisations from European music of roughly 1600 to 1900, and even inside that window composers break them knowingly. Outside it, the machinery gets steadily less useful: a little for jazz, less for folk and rock, almost nothing for music not organised around a tonic.

Finally, notation is a set of instructions, not a recording. Tempo, dynamics and articulation are approximate, rhythm is bent in performance, and the difference between two good performances of one page is larger than anything the page specifies.

What you can now do is open a score you have never seen, work out its key and metre, name its intervals and chords, put roman numerals under a phrase, find the cadences, and say why the harmony pulls where it does. The rest is repertoire: take eight bars of something you like and do to it exactly what was done above.