Music is a language

Music is a language. It can express thoughts and even tell stories- musical stories. When we hear a story we listen sentence by sentence, not letter by letter. So it is with music. Single notes by themselves mean nothing. Only when the notes are arranged into musical sentence do they take on a definite meaning. Music al sentences are called phrases.

Because it is built up of many well-ordered patterns, music has often compared to architecture.

Rhythm has been called the "Soul of Music".

Tonal shading as a painter creates beautiful pictures by lights and shadows so in music do we add color to our musical pictures by means tonal shading.

Some of our most beautiful melodies came, not as you might suppose, from the pens of famous composers but from the folk-songs which have come down to us from generation to generation. These melodies originated among the people of their homeland. They were not written down but were passed along from one person to another person. Because of their charming simplicity, many of them will endure forever as masterpieces of melody.