Measuring Up: Adding Rulers to our Teaching Tool Kits

Using a simple ruler will help students of all ages gain rhythmic evenness and reading fluency!  

Even if we choose to start lessons off the staff, eventually students are faced with reading Western music notation with five lines and four spaces. We rarely talk about the inconsistencies inherent in this system invented by medieval Italian theorist Guido of Arezzo (991-1033).  We’ve all lived with this representation of pitch for so long, it is easy to forget that learning to read music is as much about what to ignore as it is where to direct our attention.  Learning is focused discriminating concentration, which means that we take in some information while simultaneously ignoring other things.

Have you ever found a beginning student mistakenly looking for the letter name at the end of the stem rather than the notehead? Furthermore, there are many typographical inconsistencies in setting notes on the staff that we take for granted but stump new readers of music. Imagine seeing a character-based written language for the first time.  It is difficult to differentiate punctuation, sentence length and paragraph breaks from actual text. This bafflement is exactly what students of all ages see when exposed to written music during their first years of lessons.  

Students grapple with graphic confusion beyond note heads and stems. The distance between notes and the length of measures are inconsistent once we assign higher-level music. Take, for example, sonatinas. The longest note values are most often set into the slimmest of measures. No wonder students rush as if they have forgotten how to count!  Quarter notes are set closely so that sixteenth notes can be spread out to read the individual notes, opposite of how they are played. The difference in spacing between notes in a measure and the length of measures is confusing. Students must learn to ignore anomalous type to play with a steady beat. This confusion can be resolved by using a ruler. Once students can measure inconsistent distances between notes and bar lines, they will learn what they need to ignore on the page, to maintain a steady beat. Many of my students call these stumbles “optical illusions.” Watch your learners smile when they realize that often “mistakes” happen for a reason, and they just need to learn how to look.  

Penny Lazarus, NCTM, maintains a 45-student piano studio in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Penny has degrees in Piano Performance, Psychology, Art History, Secondary Education, and Ph.D. work in the Philosophy of Arts. Penny uses this broad background to explore diverse topics in journals and presentations, such as Students Misreading of Piano Scores, Teaching Music Through Art, Using Silent Movie Music to Inspire Expressivity, The Socially Conscious Piano Studio, Becoming Weavers: Music by Under-Represented Women Composers” and “Overcoming the Sticky Floor: Re-writing the Myths of Women Composers. 

Mozart Sonata, K. 545 from Alfred Masterworks Sonatina Album for the Piano, Kohler and Small edition, page 98.  Measure lengths on the first page vary from 1 inch to 1 ½, to 2 ¼, 2 ½, and 2 ¾ in length.