music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

, a double whole note (American), breve (British) or double note lasts two times as long as a

whole note A whole note (American) or semibreve (British) in musical notation is a single note equivalent to or lasting as long as two half notes or four quarter notes. Description The whole note or semibreve has a note head in the shape of a hollow ov ...

(or ''semibreve''). It is the second-longest note value still in use in modern

music notation Musical notation is any system used to visually represent music. Systems of notation generally represent the elements of a piece of music that are considered important for its performance in the context of a given musical tradition. The proces ...

. The next longest notated note is the ''longa'', which is double the length of the breve. The longest notated note (though now obsolete) is the '' maxima''.

History

In medieval

mensural notation Mensural notation is the musical notation system used for polyphony, polyphonic European vocal music from the late 13th century until the early 17th century. The term "mensural" refers to the ability of this system to describe precisely measur ...

, the ''brevis'' was one of the shortest note lengths in use, hence its name, which is the

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

etymon of " brief". In "perfect" rhythmic mode, the brevis was a third of a longa, or in "imperfect" mode, half a longa.

Form

In modern notation, a breve is commonly represented in either of two ways: by a hollow oval note head, like a whole note, with one or two vertical lines on either side, as on the left and right of the image, or as the rectangular shape also found in older notation, shown in the middle of the image. Because it lasts longer than a bar in most modern

time signature A time signature (also known as meter signature, metre signature, and measure signature) is an indication in music notation that specifies how many note values of a particular type fit into each measure ( bar). The time signature indicates th ...

s in common use, the breve is rarely encountered except in English music, where the half-note is often used as the beat unit.

Breve (double-whole) rest

A related symbol is the double whole

rest REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

(double rest or breve rest), which usually denotes a silence for the same duration.) Double whole rests are drawn as filled-in rectangles occupying the whole vertical space between the second and third lines from the top of the musical staff. They are often used in long silent passages which are not divided into separate bars to indicate a rest of two bars, regardless of the duration of each bar. This and longer rests are collectively known as multiple rests. They are also used to represent whole bar rest for

only.

Alla breve

Alla breve, the

, takes its name from the note value breve. In the mensural notation of the Renaissance, it was an alternative term for ''proportio dupla'', which meant that the ''brevis'' was to be considered the unit of time ('' tactus''), instead of the usual ''semibrevis''. The old symbol , used as an alternative to the numerical proportion 2:1 in mensural notation, is carried over into modern notational practice to indicate a smaller relative value per note shape. It is normally used for music in a relatively quick

tempo In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for 'time'; plural 'tempos', or from the Italian plural), measured in beats per minute, is the speed or pace of a given musical composition, composition, and is often also an indication of the composition ...

, where it indicates two minim (half note) beats in a bar of four crotchets (quarter notes), while is the equivalent of , with four crotchet beats.

Notes

References