Let’s face it. If you’ve ever asked a student to compose for the first time, you’ll know that often the melodies are a bit of a mess. Once in a while a miraculous melody will appear out of pure musical instinct, and that’s great. But more often than not, without any clear instructions the result will be a random collection of notes with no meaning or direction. We can help …
Why does the keyboard have the shape it has?
The shape of the keyboard depends on the shape of the hand and on the evolution of Western music.
Up to a certain point the keyboard changed according to the evolution of music, then the opposite happened and it was music that, adopting equal temperament at the beginning of the eighteenth century, showed that it did not want to give up the advantages …
There are three types of levers distinguished by the position of their elements: power, resistance, fulcrum. Human body levers are almost all of third species, ie in them the fulcrum is positioned between power and resistance. The latin word fulcrum means to support: it is the point from which a lever moves. The fulcrum is a motionless point from which levers operate and acquire their power. The fulcrum itself exerts …
Without intervals we wouldn’t have melody, chords, or scales. They really are one of the foundations of music. An interval in music is defined as a distance in pitch between any two notes. The larger the interval between two notes, then the greater the difference in pitch between the notes. And vice versa, the smaller the interval between two notes then the smaller the pitch between the notes. Semitones and …
“The fingers become like pillars or rather arches under the dome of the hand, a dome that in principle can bear the full weight of our body. I compare the arm, from shoulder to fingertip, with a hanging bridge, one end of which is fixed on the shoulder and the other to the five fingers on the keyboard. The bridge is flexible and resilient whereas it’s supports are strong and …