ABSTRACT
In this chapter we describe some basic musical notation. This material will be quite familiar to musicians, but we would like this book to be helpful to all who enjoy music. Our goal is to provide enough background so that non-musicians can follow our discussions of basic musical scores. We shall not try to explain the huge amount of notation used for all musical scores, that would require a separate book in itself.1 In the first section we discuss how notes are scored in terms of pitch. In the next section we discuss how notes are scored in terms of their relative durations. If you are a musician, you may wish to just lightly skim these sections. The third section is on key signatures. Although key signatures will be familiar to musicians, we shall also describe the mathematics that underlies the Circle of Fifths. All readers should find that material of interest.
