Rainbow Music Therory

Aloha!
Here is a true musical confession:

I have always loved music and I have REALLY not liked music theory. It was
so un-musical! What value could it have to me?
I played piano starting at about 9 years old, and took weekly, traditional learn-
to-read music lessons, which I enjoyed , until I graduated from High School. Hurray!
No more music theory sheets!!. Since I was pretty good at sight reading, and all I really
wanted was to enjoy playing music that I loved to listen to, I stuck to the pages. When
my own kids were in high school, I began to rediscover a tentative joy in composition.
But!! Do not bother me with any theory about chord structure or anything! No thanks,
that is too regimented. I played what I heard inside and with pencil and eraser, wrote
out my pieces on blank sheet music, note by note. Well, I knew enough from basic music
theory and years of observation, so , it was possible, and fun. But things were to change!
Circumstances led me to move to Hawaii Island for a teaching job, and once
there, a cat named Habibi introduced me to his mistress, who invited me to Marimba
class, and musical life changed. “What!! You mean I just play these wooden keys in a
certain pattern and I don’t get to see any music or know what notes I am playing??”
“Right! Learn to enjoy something new, playing by ear!” The cheerful melodies and
intricate harmonies and unusual rhythms drew me in and I had several wonderfully
fun years learning in and then performing with a local marimba group. I also was part
of a contradance band where melodies were memorized and chords were used and I
began to open to learning the musical structure upon which music , like a butterfly on a
flower, is able to land.
When I took on teaching a few very beginner piano and harp students, I wanted
to come up with a different way to learn than I had. I wanted students to feel at home
in this structure of music with their eyes AND their ears, using their hearts and the
feelings in their fingers and hands. I wanted everyone to feel musical confidence, and to
know that anyone can create a musical composition. Having been an artist of sorts and
a Waldorf teacher, I loved color and decided to create a little rainbow system for
learning notes. I wanted to correlate the piano and harp. And even make the system
potentially usable by musicians using fretted instruments.
The following pages are what I have created so far, and I hope to receive
friendly feedback on how to improve what I want to share. What I have
created is not a totally “Do it yourself program” . What I offer functions
better I think with a friendly person as a musical guide, someone already
familiar and comfortable with music theory, and technique. I am not the
one to teach HOW to play the harp…not having “proper” training. But I
offer my rainbow system as a way to enhance learning.
PG. 1 What IS music?
I like to think of it as a song, arising out of silence, entering our soul

and expressed by some instrument, or many…The original instrument, our
body, frees our voice. Other invented instruments take our breath or our
movement and give musical sound. We know and feel music, even if we
can’t ever really explain it completely. Why should we?
We do like to share music. We sing alone and there is a melody. Like

bird song, tones of a melody rise and fall. We sing with a friend whose
additional but different tones create a harmony. We can clap our hands or
tap our feet to a certain beat , the pulse of the music. To be more
expressive and alive, rhythms add different patterns to the pulse.
A melody is a bit like a trail through a varied landscape. “You are my

sunshine, my only sunshine” Is our example. If I want to share my song
with someone far away, I need to map it out. We transcribe or map the
music from our voice and ears into our hands and eyes and onto a page,
using a system of notes, with names. Do,re,mi,fa,sol,la, ti and again…do!
We have a small musical alphabet for these notes: A,B,C,D,E,F,G and A
These notes, one sounded after the other, are called a scale: 7 notes
and then the same one again but an “octave” higher! (The “why?” is
explainable but, maybe some other time!! ) This Western musical scale of
seven notes is actually built on a ladder of 12 half steps. Between do and
re, between re and mi, are 2 half steps. Between mi and fa, only 1 half
step. Between fa & sol, Sol & la, la & ti there are whole steps. between ti
and the next higher do, is only a half step. Thats just how it is!
PG. 2 Comparing Piano and Harp
The piano helps us understand the scale with its half and whole
steps, when we look at the scale of 8 notes going from what is called
Middle C to the C and octave above. We see white keys, with black keys
between most of the white keys. The black keys are half steps from one
white key to the next. Two white keys side by side are only a half step
apart. If you look inside the piano, there is a string for all white and black
keys. Other instruments have more complex ways to play all these notes.
The harp has strings but there are none that match the black keys,
only ones that match the white keys, if your harp is tuned in the key of C!!
That is, when your red strings are all C’s and the blue ones are all F’s .
This is a do-re-mi scale : C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C. Some harpists tune their harps
to the scale or key of E flat…to be explained LATER!!
Here is where I decided to invent my rainbow scale, because
between the red C strings and blue F strings on harp, I could put pink D
and purple E. Then from blue F to green G, to yellow A and orange B…
voila, very pretty!. And hopefully a useful learning tool.
PG. 3. Sharping and Flatting , treble and base clef
Our beautiful rainbow scale is used so that we can play melody,

harmony and accompaniment using both left and right hands, when playing
harp or piano. When writing music we need a way to show this. We use
two musical ladders, each a “staff” of five lines . Treble, with its symbol (G
clef ) for the right hand; Bass with its symbol (F clef ) for the left hand. Our
melody uses the lines and also (magically) the spaces between to climb
and descend this “ladder” . In traditional music lessons we memorize that
the spaces are labelled F,A,C,E (face). We learn a jingle for the lines, and I
like : Every Glorious Butterfly Deserves Freedom (( E,G,B,D,F )
Now that we have that rainbow scale going up the ladder of lines and
spaces, we need to come back again to the difference between harp and
piano. We can remember that there are no strings to correspond to the
black keys. But!! there are sounds that are made by playing the black keys.
We get those by using our sharping levers. On a concert harp, the solution
is different. Foot pedals are used to cause the string to be made sharp. (A
concert harpist can explain this., Not me) . Sharp is a higher tone or pitch.
Flat is lower. Music sounds “right” when halfway between C and D is C#.
On page three there is a diagram showing the piano keys with the blackens
labeled with both a sharp name and a flat name. The sharp is halfway past
the previous white key so keeps its name C to C#. But the flat is half way
before the following white key and takes its name, B flat to B. When all
these half steps are played on the piano, we hear what is called a
Chromatic scale, of twelve different nots and then the lucky thirteenth is the
fist, or tonic note of the scale, repeated again an octave up. YAY!
We who play harps with sharping levers, tend to play less
complicated music that tends to avoid “accidentals” . Well, who wouldn’t
want to avoid them! Accidentals are sharps of flats that show up in the
middle of a measure but they were not previously prescribed in by the
composer in the key signature of the piece. The WHAT??????

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Aloha!

Here is a true musical confession:

PG. 1 What IS music?

I like to think of it as a song, arising out of silence, entering our soul

We do like to share music. We sing alone and there is a melody. Like

A melody is a bit like a trail through a varied landscape. “You are my

PG. 3. Sharping and Flatting , treble and base clef

Our beautiful rainbow scale is used so that we can play melody,

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