The staff

We already call a sound "high" or "low" without thinking about it. Written music takes the words literally: the sign for a high sound sits higher on the page, and the sign for a low sound sits lower. To turn "higher" and "lower" into exact measurements rather than guesses, there is the staff: five horizontal lines, parallel and evenly spaced.

British English also calls it the stave. Both words mean the same thing.

Lines and spaces

Between the five lines are four spaces, and a note can be written in any of those nine places: on a line, with the line running through the middle of the note, or in a space, between two lines, touching neither.

Lines and spaces are counted from the bottom up. The bottom line is the first and the top line is the fifth; the bottom space is the first and the top space is the fourth. When a musician says "the note on the second line", that is the count they mean.

Hear the passage

These are the nine places, from lowest to highest: first line, first space, second line, second space, and so on up to the fifth line. Notice that line and space alternate. There is no step in between a line and the space just above it: moving from one to the other is moving to the next note. Listen and follow with your eyes, and every step up on the page is a step up in sound.

The large sign at the start of the staff is the clef. It is what says which note lives in each place, and it has a topic of its own. For now, only position matters: higher up, higher sound.

The shape of a melody

Because pitch becomes position, a written melody has a shape you can see before you hear it.

Hear the passage

This is the start of the theme of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". Look at the outline: the melody climbs slowly, reaches its highest point, falls below where it started and climbs back to the note it began on. You do not need to know the name of a single note to see that movement, which is why the staff works so well. It is read the way text is read, from left to right.

Two notes near the end dropped below the staff and got a short line of their own. That is the subject of the next section.

Beyond the five lines

Nine places do not cover every sound. To write a note higher or lower than the staff reaches, ledger lines are added: short lines, spaced like the lines of the staff, drawn only where there is a note. They bring spaces of their own with them.

Hear the passage

Going down from the second line: the note leaves the staff through the space just below the first line, then takes the first ledger line, the space below it, and the second ledger line. The same works upwards:

Hear the passage

Outside the staff, the count is different. Ledger lines are numbered from the staff outwards: above it, the first is the closest and the others climb; below it, the first is also the closest and the others descend. That is how Lacerda numbers them (Lacerda 1966, ch. II).

Each note takes only the ledger lines it needs. An extra line beyond the note adds nothing and only gets in the way of reading, a point Blatter makes with a right and a wrong example side by side (Blatter 2007, art. 2).

The parts of a written note

A written note has up to three parts. The head is the round part, and its position is what counts: the head is what sits on the line or in the space. The stem is the vertical stroke attached to the head. The flag is the hook at the end of the stem. Not every note has all three; which parts appear depends on how long the sound lasts, which is the subject of the topic on note values and rests.

The stem does not point up or down at random. The rule looks at the third line, the middle one:

• below the third line, the stem goes up, on the right of the head;
• above the third line, the stem goes down, on the left;
• on the third line itself, either is correct, and down is the custom.

Hear the passage

The reason is practical: this way the stem stays inside the staff instead of reaching out of it, where it would run into the notes of the staff above or below. The flag follows the stem and always sits on the right, pointing right.

What comes next

The staff says that one note is higher or lower than another, but not yet which note it is. Giving a name to every line and every space takes the clef.