Rests
Just like the notes, the rest symbols already had the same shapes that were later to develop into the modern symbols (with the smaller values being successively introduced in the course of the period of Mensural notation). Unlike the notes themselves, rests had a fixed, invariable duration and could not be perfected, imperfected or alterated; however, they could in turn induce imperfection on a neighbouring larger note. For longa rests, there were two separate forms for the perfect (triplex) and for the imperfect (duplex) longa. As a consequence of their invariant duration, a sequence of rests could be used as an indication of the prevailing meter of a composition (in the absence of modern bar notation). This is often found at the beginning of the tenor voice of a composition.
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Famous quotes containing the word rests:
“The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is cotter-pinned, it is bedded true.
Everything its parts can do
Has been thought out and accounted for.
Your least touch sets it going round,
And when top stop it rests with you.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)