music notation Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

, a note value indicates the relative duration of a

note Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to: Music and entertainment * Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music * ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian * ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened version ...

, using the texture or shape of the ''

notehead In music, a notehead is the part of a note, usually elliptical in shape, whose placement on the staff indicates the pitch, to which modifications are made that indicate duration. Noteheads may be the same shape but colored completely bl ...

'', the presence or absence of a '' stem'', and the presence or absence of ''flags/ beams/hooks/tails''. Unmodified note values are fractional powers of two, for example one, one-half, one fourth, etc. A

rest Rest or REST may refer to: Relief from activity * Sleep ** Bed rest * Kneeling * Lying (position) * Sitting * Squatting position Structural support * Structural support ** Rest (cue sports) ** Armrest ** Headrest ** Footrest Arts and enter ...

indicates a silence of an equivalent duration.

List

Shorter notes can be created theoretically ''ad infinitum'' by adding further flags, but are very rare.

Variations

The breve appears in several different versions, as shown at right. The first two are commonly used; the third is a stylistic alternative. Sometimes the longa or breve is used to indicate a very long note of indefinite duration, as at the end of a piece (e.g. at the end of Mozart's Mass KV 192). A single eighth note, or any faster note, is always stemmed with flags, while two or more are usually beamed in groups.Gerou, Tom (1996). ''Essential Dictionary of Music Notation'', p.211. Alfred. When a stem is present, it can go either up (from the right side of the note head) or down (from the left side), except in the cases of the ''longa'' or ''maxima'' which are nearly always written with downward stems. In most cases, the stem goes down if the notehead is on the center line or above, and up otherwise. Any flags always go to the right of the stem. beamed notes

Modifiers

A note value may be augmented by adding a dot after it. This dot adds the next briefer note value, making it one and a half times its original duration. A number of dots (''n'') lengthen the note value by its value, so two dots add two lower note values, making a total of one and three quarters times its original duration. The rare three dots make it one and seven eighths the duration, and so on. The double dot was first used in 1752 by J. J. Quantz; Willi Apel, "Dotted Notes", ''Harvard Dictionary of Music'', second edition, revised and enlarged (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972) . in music of the 18th century and earlier the amount by which the dot augmented the note varied: it could be more or less than the modern interpretation, to fit into the context. To divide a note value to three equal parts, or some other value than two,

tuplet In music, a tuplet (also irrational rhythm or groupings, artificial division or groupings, abnormal divisions, irregular rhythm, gruppetto, extra-metric groupings, or, rarely, contrametric rhythm) is "any rhythm that involves dividing the beat ...

s may be used. However, see swung note and

notes inégales In music, ''notes inégales'' is a performance practice, mainly from the Baroque and Classical music eras, in which some notes with equal written time values are performed with unequal durations, usually as alternating long and short. The pra ...

History

Gregorian chant

Although note heads of various shapes, and notes with and without stems appear in early

Gregorian chant Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainsong, plainchant, a form of monophony, monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song in Latin (and occasionally Greek (language), Greek) of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed ma ...

manuscripts, many scholars agree that these symbols do not indicate different durations, although the dot is used for augmentation. See

neume A neume (; sometimes spelled neum) is the basic element of Western and Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation. The earliest neumes were inflective marks that indicated the general shape but not nec ...

. In the 13th century, chant was sometimes performed according to rhythmic modes, roughly equivalent to meters; however, the note shapes still did not indicate duration in the same way as modern note values.

Mensural notation

Around 1250, Franco of Cologne invented different symbols for different durations, although the relation between different note values could vary; three was the most common ratio. Philippe de Vitry's treatise Ars nova (1320) described a system in which the ratios of different note values could be 2:1 or 3:1, with a system of mensural

time signature The time signature (also known as meter signature, metre signature, or measure signature) is a notational convention used in Western musical notation to specify how many beats (pulses) are contained in each measure (bar), and which note va ...

s to distinguish between them. This black

mensural notation Mensural notation is the musical notation system used for European vocal polyphonic music from the later part of the 13th century until about 1600. The term "mensural" refers to the ability of this system to describe precisely measured rhythmi ...

gave way to ''white mensural notation'' around 1450, in which all note values were written with white (outline) noteheads. In white notation the use of

triplets A multiple birth is the culmination of one multiple pregnancy, wherein the mother gives birth to two or more babies. A term most applicable to vertebrate species, multiple births occur in most kinds of mammals, with varying frequencies. Such bi ...

was indicated by ''coloration'', i.e. filling in the noteheads to make them black (or sometimes red). Both black and white notation periodically made use of ligatures, a holdover from the ''clivis'' and ''porrectus''

s used in chant. Around 1600 the modern notational system was generally adopted, along with

barlines In musical notation, a bar (or measure) is a segment of time corresponding to a specific number of beats in which each beat is represented by a particular note value and the boundaries of the bar are indicated by vertical bar lines. Dividing mu ...

and the practice of writing multipart music in scores rather than only individual parts. In the 17th century, however, old usages came up occasionally.

Origins of the names

The British names go back at least to English renaissance music, and the terms of Latin origin had international currency at that time. ''Longa'' means 'long', and many of the rest indicate relative shortness. ''Breve'' is from Latin ''brevis'', 'short', ''minim'' is from ''minimus'', 'very small', and ''quaver'' refers to the quavering effect of very fast notes. The elements ''semi-'', ''demi-'' and ''hemi-'' mean 'half' in Latin, French and Greek respectively. The chain semantic shift whereby notes which were originally perceived as short came progressively to be long notes is interesting both linguistically and musically. However, the ''crotchet'' is named after the shape of the note, from the Old French for a 'little hook', and it is possible to argue that the same is true of the ''minim'', since the word is also used in palaeography to mean a vertical stroke in mediaeval handwriting.

References

{{Rhythm and meter