For many people, the first experience of ensemble performance is singing rounds when they are children. In the AcademyΓÇÖs Round Room you can see how this simple musical structure works, by putting the notes on to the musical staves yourself.
The process of writing music is known as notation. Music is read from right to left across the page. This horizontal dimension represents time. In our example the space of time between two bar -lines is always the same. What each note looks like tells you how long that note should last (whether it is a minim, crotchet, or semiquaver, for example). Once you know how long each note should last, you can define the rhythm of the piece.
The vertical dimension in musical donation defines the pitch. The higher the note on the stave, the higher it sounds. Every note appears either in a space or on a line of the stave. Musicians need to learn exactly what note each line and space represents. Then they know whether a note is, for example, a C or an A.
Where notes are placed vertically directly above and below each other, they are intended to sound at the same time, and produce a chord. The progression of chords, and the sounds that they make, is the basis of classical harmony. The concurrent playing of two tunes, or the same tune starting at different times (as in the round) is the substance of counterpoint.. Harmony and counterpoint have been the basic compositional tools of classical music since the seventeenth century.
The round is a simple musical form which is closely related to the more complex classical fugue. Historically it is also related to the traditions of folksong and part-songs that inspired the formalised madrigal and ayre.
