Musical Terminology

Date Written: September 5, 2022; Last Modified: September 5, 2022

I’m a classically trained musician, and I remember having to learn about “music theory” at the piano school I went to. I found it unbearably boring, to the point that I got a 40% or something on the theory test because I got distracted by the group photos on the wall in the testing room. Do you have any idea how hard it is to fail something at an extra-curricular music school run by college students? Oh, my dad was more steamed than the rice we ate that night.

I think the issue was that I didn’t see a need to use any of the terms that I was taught at the time. I was maybe 10 years old, and I had only been playing for about a year. I hardly even cared about music, to be honest; like many other kids that age, I was just coerced into music lessons by my parents. What kind of 10 year old uses “subdominant” or “key signature” in their conversations?

It wasn’t until I started talking about music that these words became ingrained in my vocabrulary. How else does a conductor communicate with the musicians? How else do teachers communicate the significance of certain notes or dynamic markings?

I’ll try to give a good overview of all the technical terminology I think you should know. It’s definitely far from complete, so I’ll link external resources when necessary.

All that being said, and all the stuff you see below being written, I still think it’s important to talk about how music feels and sounds like on an emotional level. Back in my high school English classes, we were encouraged to talk about how an author’s choice of words evoked certain emotions and how that fit in with the book’s themes and messages. Someone reading those (frankly awful) essays I wrote may not understand what “connotation” is, but they can still glean high-level insight from how certain words and events worked together thematically.

Same idea with music: even if you don’t understand what “chord progressions” or “key changes” are, you are still capable of engaging with music on an emotional level, and I think that’s enough to appreciate and talk about music.

The Basics

Understand musical notation. You don’t have to be fluent enough to read sheet music, but know that the letters A through G represent different notes.

The astute reader will notice that music is comprised of more than 7 notes. This claim is dubious, but unfortunately true. Notes that are separated by an octave are given the same name. This is because their sound waves overlap with each other perfectly, and notes an octave apart are in perfect harmony with each other.

Musical intervals are very important: they describe how much two notes are separated by. A and C are a third apart because there are three notes between them: A, B, C. Two A’s are an octave apart, etc. The smallest interval is a half step or semitone. Two half steps make a whole step.

The sharp symbol # tells you to raise a note by a half-step: A# therefore denotes the note directly above A. The flat symbol b tells you to lower a note by a half-step. Sharp and flat are sometimes taken to mean “higher in pitch” or “lower in pitch” respectively, regardless of how far apart two notes are (e.g. D is sharper than C).

Scales and Chords

In classical music, the most commonly used scales are the major (or ionian) and natural minor (or aeolian) scales. These are two of the diatonic scales, which arrange five whole steps and two half steps in some order. There are many more scalar modes, which arrange almost any number of ascending notes. Pentatonic scales are quite prevalent in jazz, and some other important variants are the Bebop and blues scales.

Chords are what happen when you play more than one note at a time. Each chord has a root — think of it as the “starting point” or foundation from which the chord is built up on. If you add a major third and perfect fifth on top of the root, you get a major triad! There are many other chords, but the most common basic ones are:

Major triad: the one that sounds happy
Minor triad: the one that sounds sad
Major seventh: Add a major seventh from the root to the major triad. It’s dissonant in a way that evokes feelings of nostalgia for me.
Dominant seventh: Add a flat seventh from the root to the major triad. It introduces dissonance without changing the “feel” of the major chord too much.
Suspended chord: Consisting of a fourth and fifth, these chords are very “ambiguous” in the sense that the feelings they evoke are heavily dependent on the chords around them. For this reason, they’re typically used to transition between different chords.

The scales and chords that musicians use to play melodies and harmonies dictate the “shape” or “feel” of the music, especially when musicians change between them. I like to think of them as “dictionaries” of sounds that composers can draw from, and these affect music the same way word choice affects tone in writing.

Key signatures tell musicians which notes and thereby which scales to use. Many scales may share the same key signature, and so the key is highly dependent on the way the music is shaped.

Time Signatures and Rhythms

Books are divided into chapters, paragraphs, and sentences. In classical music, concertos and sonatas would be divided into “movements”, which are analogous to chapters. All music is divided into regular beats (I think you know what a beat is…), and the beats are arranged into measures. The time signature tells you how to count the beat and how many beats belong in each measure.

Waltzes are in 3/4 time: each measure is made of 3 beats, and each beat is made of a quarter note (hence the 4). The most common way to count is 4/4, where each measure gets 4 beats and each beat is a quarter note.

Phrases are like sentences in writing: it’s a group of notes that is linked together in the melody. Phrases are very arbitrary, so don’t feel bad if you have no clue what this means.

The rhythm is how notes are temporally arranged. Subdivisions are how each beat is divided into smaller pieces, and polyrhythms are when the beat is subdivided differently by two musicians at the same time. A 4/3 (read “four on three”) polyrhythm is when one musician subdivides the beat or measure into four notes while another subdivides it into three. Try doing tapping this out with your left and right hands — it’s really hard.

Structure

If you were caught off guard by the words “melodies” and “harmonies”, that’s okay. Those are parts of how music is structured, and it’s important to have language that discusses the different moving components in music.

On the broadest level, the melody is the main “tune” in a song, and the harmonies are the chords and notes that support or accompany the melody. Although we recognise songs by their melodies, the harmonies are often at least just as important.

A motif is a short sequence of notes that gets repeated throughout the song. A motif could be something that’s obvious, like a catchy part of the melody, or something very subtle, such as a sequence of chord changes. What’s important is that it’s repeated in a (musically) significant way. I don’t know if there’s an exact definition for this.

Chord Changes

Where scales and chords shape the “feeling” of music in the moment, chord changes and key changes shape the “flow” of the music. When you watch a movie or read a book, there’s always conflict, and it’s the conflict that drives the characters and the stories forward. Similarly, music is driven by an ebb and flow of dissonance. This dissonance is built up by chord changes, and much like how characters will resolve their conflicts (or die horrifically, I guess), the chord changes will eventually resolve the dissonance they’ve built up again. A sequence of chord changes is called a chord progression.

Listening to music with oft-used or predictable chord progressions feels like watching a movie where you know what’s going to happen next. Sometimes it’s still entertaining, but it doesn’t always feel remarkable (musically). On the other hand, music that has surprising chord progressions that go against our musical expectations stand out. The four chord progression is an oft-cited example of a predictable chord progression, and it’s the crux of many arguments that claim all pop music sounds the same.

Something important to note is that using weird progressions doesn’t automatically make a song good, and using a common or popular chord progression doesn’t make a song bad. Many, many great works of literature and film use the Hero’s journey, and none are critiqued for being predictable or derivative because of everything else that they do.

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