Ever since the dawn of man there has been music in one form or another. Weather it is a simple melody made by a baby, poems set to simple harp music such as king David, or more complex songs that we have today. Story telling has also been around just as long. Even as early as the 15th century, relatively speaking, story telling and music relied on hearing hearing and memorization. We have all heard of stories that were “passed down through the centuries” and these are the stories that parents told their children, and their children told their children, and so on. Stories such as these relied on the hearer to be able to learn and memorize the details of the story in order to be able to tell the story again later. This was primarily because not many people could read or write, and some cultures going back far enough didn’t even have a system of writing.

As you can expect, and as we have seen with the game of Telephone, the repetitions of these stories can start to loose details, and important facts can even change over time. Music had the same fate relying solely on one’s ability to memorize a tune from one or two hearings. The disadvantage music has over story telling is that we can much more easily apply different words to the same facts of a story and still achieve an accurate portrayal of the main story. Applying different notes to a melody fundamentally changes the music, and it is much harder to immediately recall which note came when and in what order. As such, musicians of old generally wrote and performed their own music, and the only way to hear this music was to see them perform it.

It is worth mentioning that for difficulty of repeating notes in a specific order, folk songs, bar songs, shanties and the like were simple enough songs that corporate repetitions were able to solidify themselves in the culture. The more a song was sung together in a bar or at a festival, the more it imprinted in everyone’s memory. Many of these tunes survive even today. And because there was no system to write or notate music, there is most assuredly stories and music that have been lost forever simply because people stopped telling them.

Just as the implementation of alphabets and written words has helped to preserve stories and even historical accounts of events, so has music notation preserved music, as it was first intended by the composer, through time. Anyone who can read words made up of the alphabet, or notes on a piece of paper can now enjoy these things for themselves whenever they choose.

People accept a book as “the story” so no longer need someone to recite if for them to enjoy it, or even write a story themselves. Music is the same way, but music notation can be a real hangup for people. Music notation essentially functions the same as the written word, so if you are able to read a book you have the capacity to read music. And actually, reading music can be much easier than words as there are far fewer notes than letters in the alphabet, and even fewer chords than there are total words.
So lets take a look at some the basics of music notation to get a good foothold in understanding how to read music

When we think of notated music, we often think of a grand staff with all kinds of crazy looking notes going every-which-way. Such as this original manuscript from Bach. This is indeed music notation. And it does instruct a performer what notes to play and when to play them. And even how to play them, to an extent.

But notation these days is much cleaner looking and more comprehensible, such as this excerpt from my 1st symphony:

Symphony 1 pg 146

Even though this score is much neater looking than if it were handwritten, its a lot to take in.
Lets take a step back and look at something that contains less information.

This is one single instrument part of the same symphony. All orchestral music is written on a 5 line staff like this, and it identifies the range of notes to played and where. But we can scale these 5 lines down to one for percussion instruments that have no discernible pitch, such as a drum or piatti, the so-called “crash cymbal”.

At the start of the suspended cymbal part is a symbol that looks like this: 

This is called the percussion clef.
There are 2 percussion clefs in use and though they look a little different from each other, they both mean the same thing.
Both clefs indicate that there is no pitch, or notes, associated with the instrument such as drums and other non-pitched percussion. The notation for such instruments denote rhythm only and can therefore be noted on a single line.

A clef tells us what type of instrument the music is written for and which instruments can play it. The vertical lines are called bar lines which split the music into equal groupings of notes, which makes reading the music more digestible, similarly to how we eat bites of a subway sandwich as opposed to fitting the whole thing into our stomach with one swallow. These “bites” of music between each bar line is called a measure. They are also referred to as “bars” in more modern settings.
Right after the clef is the meter, also called the “time signature” both terms mean the same things and are interchangeable. This particular time signature, or meter, is 4/4 witch is a visual direction that there are 4 beats to each measure, and that the quarter note is equal to one beat. The final bar line indicates the end of the piece.