Staff lines

What it means

The staff lines form the grid on which pitches are represented spatially. The higher a note stands on the staff, the higher it sounds — this correspondence of up and high has become so self-evident that it is easy to overlook what an invention lies in it. Five lines and the four spaces between them give nine levels; with ledger lines the grid can be extended upward and downward.

In the notation

Counting always proceeds from bottom to top: the lowest line is the first. Lines and spaces alternate and designate consecutive natural notes — a note on a line and the next one in the space above stand a second apart. Which note lies on which line is stated only by the clef; without it the staff designates only distances, not pitches. Alongside the usual five-line staff there is the four-line one of square notation for liturgical chant, a one-line one for percussion without definite pitch, and multi-line special forms, for instance in tablatures.

Musical use

The development toward the staff system was the decisive step from a memory aid to actual musical notation: as long as neumes stood freely above the text, only the direction of movement was readable; with a fixed reference line the intervals became unambiguous, and an unknown melody could for the first time be sung from the writing alone. The restriction to five lines is a compromise between range and legibility — more lines would offer more space but could no longer be counted at a glance.

The five-line staff became established in the seventeenth century.

Performance practice

Do not read line by line but by anchor points: memorize a few fixed notes on the staff and grasp the rest as distance from them. Deliberately practise recognizing second, third, and fifth distances in the notation — line to next line is always a third, line to the line after next a fifth. With large leaps it helps not to name the notes individually but to recognize and grasp the interval.