Category General Knowledge

Long ago, thousands of rats invaded the German town of Hamelin. The rats were everywhere. They even swarmed into the houses. People could not move without touching a rat. Neither cats nor traps could destroy the swarm of rats.

One Friday, a piper wearing a many-coloured cloak came to town. “I can rid your town of rats,” the piper told the mayor.

“Then I will pay you one coin a head,” the mayor said.

As soon as the moon rose, the stranger started playing a haunting tune. Rats ran out of all the houses into the town square. The piper played a lively tune and led the rats to the nearby Weser River. The rats rushed to the water and jumped right in.

“Pay me,” the piper said to the mayor on Saturday morning. “Nine hundred and ninety thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine rats drowned in the river. You owe me one coin a head.”

“Let us count the heads first,” the mayor said.

“If you want the heads,” the piper cried, “fetch them from the river.”

“By rights, we can refuse to pay you anything,” the mayor answered.

“If you do not pay me, your children will,” said the piper.

“Collect from our children?” the townspeople jeered. “How cleverly the mayor has tricked the piper!”

On Sunday, after the townspeople returned from church, they looked all around for their sons and daughters. “Where can they be?” the people asked.

In all of Hamelin, only one lame boy remained. “The piper played a haunting tune, and the children followed him out of town,” the boy told the parents. “That nearby hill opened wide, and they marched right in. By the time I reached the hill, the opening had closed.”

The parents ran out of town with axes and hammers. They tried but failed to open up the hill that had swallowed their children. Most miserable of all was the mayor. He had lost three boys and two girls.

“The mayor should have paid the piper,” the townspeople moaned. “How could we think he was clever? He is the biggest fool of us all!”

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Once a jolly swagman camped beside a billabong,

Under the shade of a coolibah tree,

And he sang as he sat and waited while his billy boiled,

“Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?”

These are words from “Waltzing Matilda,” an Australian ballad, or song that tells a story. Ballads are one kind of folk music. Folk music includes all the traditional songs of a country or group of people.

People learn folk songs by listening. They pass the song from person to person, from place to place and from parents to children. Often the melody and words develop over many years. So, most of the time, nobody knows who made up a folk song.

Some songs that are written by composers become folk songs, too. If many people in a country like a song and sing it often, they think of it as theirs. It says something about their people and their country.

People in Australia think of “Waltzing Matilda” as their song. And when people around the world hear the song, they think of Australians. So although the composer is known – his name is “Banjo” Paterson – “Waltzing Matilda” is certainly a folk song, a song of the people.

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Imagine yourself in a big hall where a large orchestra is preparing to play. The musicians are tuning up their instruments. It sounds noisy. Why? The instruments are not in harmony yet.

Soon, the performance begins. Each family of instruments has a special job. Some instruments – the strings, brass, or woodwinds – play the melody. Others, such as drums, make the beat or the rhythm. Different instruments add different tones. The woodwinds sound soft and light, while the brass instruments provide a strong background. All the instruments play in harmony. In other words, they sound good together.

During the concert, the musicians watch the conductor’s signals. The conductor holds a small stick called a baton in the right hand. The baton tells the musicians when to play slow and when to play fast.

With the left hand, the conductor points to different parts of the orchestra. This signals them that it is time for them to play. The left hand also tells the musicians whether to play soft or loud.

Some conductors even use facial expressions. They make themselves look happy, or sad, or angry. These facial expressions show the musicians how their music should make listeners feel.

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A musical scale is a set of notes arranged from the lowest pitch to the highest. Western composers – those from the U.S.A., Europe, and Australia – call the notes in their scale A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. The distance between a note and the next highest note by the same name is called an octave.

An octave also includes sharps – half tones above notes – and flats – half tones below notes. The distance between a note and its sharp or a note and its flat is called a half step. The letter notes and half steps add up to a total of 12 full steps in the Western scale.

Music from countries in the eastern part of the world, such as China, India, and Saudi Arabia, sounds different from Western music, because Asian music has more kinds of notes than Western music has. For example, the Arab scale has 17 steps in each octave. The Indian scale has even more – 22 steps.

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A composer uses notes – the written signs that show the length and the highness or lowness of sound – to write music on paper just as an author uses letters to write a story. Composers use different kinds of notes to tell musicians how long to play each sound.

This note, for example, is a quick note, like a clap of your hands or saying “oh”:

These are notes in order from shortest to longest sound:

Sometimes the composer wants the music to stop for a few beats. Composers show this by using symbols called rests.

These are three kinds of rests:

This rest means to pause for just a short moment:

This rest means to pause a little longer:

This rest means to stop for even longer:

A composer arranges them on a group of five or ten lines called a staff. High notes go on the upper lines. Low notes go on the lower lines. Can you identify the notes and rests in this line from a song?

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Prokofiev, the Children’s Composer

Imagine composing songs for a play at age 9. Sergei Prokofiev did just that. Prokofiev’s play, The Giant, included marches and waltzes. It also told of an outlaw giant who became a king.

Sergei Prokofiev was born in 1891 in Ukraine, a country in Europe. (At that time, Ukraine was part of Russia.) Like most children, Sergei enjoyed fairy tales. But he considered them amusing rather than magical.

Prokofiev did not like popular tunes. He preferred music that surprised people and made them smile. He developed his talent for writing such music at the Conservatory, a music school in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In 1917, there was a revolution in Russia. A Communist government took over. The Communist rulers tried to control the arts as well as the government. So Prokofiev left Russia for the U.S.A. in 1918.

Within five years, orchestras in the U.S.A. and Europe were performing Prokofiev’s music. In 1927, the Communists welcomed Prokofiev’s performances to the Soviet Union, the Communist’s name for Russia. Nine years later, Prokofiev, his wife, and their two sons moved to the Soviet Union and settled in Moscow.

Soon after, Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf for the Moscow Children’s Musical Theatre. He gave each character its own special music. Violins play when Peter takes the stage. Flutes announce the presence of a bird. An oboe speaks for a duck, and a French horn warns that the wolf is near.

Peter and the Wolf  has been loved by children for years. It also helps children recognize the sounds of different instruments.

The Basic Ingredients of Music

To make a cake, a baker uses basic ingredients like flour, sugar, and oil. To make music, a composer – a person who makes up music – uses basic ingredients too. They are tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony.

Tone is the difference in pitch between two notes. Pitch is the highness or lowness of a note’s sound. Notes are the building blocks of a piece of music.

Different notes are held for different lengths of time. Some notes last a long time just as some sounds do. Think of the slow swish-swish of windscreen wipers. Other notes last a short time – like the rapid raindrops in a storm. A composer mixes slow and quick notes to create rhythm.

Melody is the part of music that people hum. To make a melody, a composer mixes tones and rhythms. Short pieces of music, such as songs, have only one melody. Very long pieces of music, such as symphonies, have several melodies.

A composer creates harmony by sounding three or more notes together. Most music in Western countries is based on the idea of harmony.

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