Rutgers – Music 133 (& 134)

Hey everyone and welcome to the course! Just to get your brain warmed up for the kinds of things we’ll be doing in this course, try the following brain game:

1. Pick a song you like. It should be a relatively simple one — if you like John Coltrane, don’t pick one of his solos (too complicated!). Maybe a really hummable pop song, or your favorite lullaby from childhood.

2. Figure out what the first line of the song is. For example, for the song Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the first line is “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.” Figure out what the equivalent chunk of music is for your song. If it has lyrics, it’s probably the end of the first sentence of the lyrics.

3. Figure out how many different notes or tones there are in that line of music. A note is one musical sound, as in the sound you sing on the word “star” in Twinkle Twinkle. This may be trickier than it sounds!

4. Figure out which notes are “higher” and which are “lower”. For example, the first “twinkle” (which is actually two notes….hint, hint) is lower than the second one. If you want to, use graph paper to plot how many there are and how high or low they are. Congrats, you just got introduced to Unit 1!

5. Bonus: if you can, figure out which notes are longer (take up more time) or shorter (take up less). You don’t have to figure out exactly HOW long or short — just relative to each other. You could plot that somehow too on the graph paper. And there we have Unit 2!

And you’re done! This kind of listening and thinking is what this course is all about.

IF this felt way too hard to do, that’s a GOOD thing – it means you’re going to get a lot out of this course!

If it was too easy for you, that’s also good — it just means the first couple of units will be easier for you, before it starts getting harder later on! There will be plenty to challenge you in this course no matter what.