Notes and Rests
Note and rest values are not absolutely defined, but are proportional in duration to all other note and rest values. The whole note is the reference value, and the other notes are named (in American usage) in comparison; i.e. a quarter note is a quarter the length of a whole note.
| Note | British name / American name | Rest |
| Breve / Double whole note | ||
| Semibreve / Whole note | ||
| Minim / Half note | ||
| Crotchet / Quarter note | ||
| Quaver / Eighth note For notes of this length and shorter, the note has the same number of flags (or hooks) as the rest has branches. |
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| Semiquaver / Sixteenth note | ||
| Demisemiquaver / Thirty-second note | ||
| Hemidemisemiquaver / Sixty-fourth note | ||
| Beamed notes Beams connect eighth notes (quavers) and notes of shorter value, and are equivalent in value to flags. In metered music, beams reflect the rhythmic grouping of notes. They may also be used to group short phrases of notes of the same value, regardless of the meter; this is more common in ametrical passages. In older printings of vocal music, beams are often only used when several notes are to be sung on one syllable of the text – melismatic singing; modern notation encourages the use of beaming in a consistent manner with instrumental engraving, and the presence of beams or flags no longer informs the singer. Today, due to the body of music in which traditional metric states are not always assumed, beaming is at the discretion of the composer or arranger and irregular beams are often used to place emphasis on a particular rhythmic pattern. |
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| Dotted note Placing a dot to the right of a notehead lengthens the note's duration by one-half. Additional dots lengthen the previous dot instead of the original note, thus a note with one dot is one and one half its original value, a note with two dots is one and three quarters, a note with three dots is one and seven eighths, and so on. Rests can be dotted in the same manner as notes. In other words, n dots lengthen the note's or rest's original d duration to . |
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| Multi-measure rest Indicates the number of measures in a resting part without a change in meter, used to conserve space and to simplify notation. Also called "gathered rest" or "multi-bar rest". |
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Durations shorter than the 64th are rare but not unknown. 128th notes are used by Mozart and Beethoven; 256th notes occur in works of Vivaldi and even Beethoven. An extreme case is the Toccata Grande Cromatica by early-19th-century American composer Anthony Philip Heinrich, which uses note values as short as 2,048ths; however, the context shows clearly that these notes have one beam more than intended, so they should really be 1,024th notes.
The name of very short notes can be found with this formula: th note.
Read more about this topic: List Of Musical Symbols
Famous quotes containing the words notes and/or rests:
“I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My aversion from music rests on political grounds.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)