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 Duration may refer to: * The amount of time elapsed between two events * Duration (music) – an amount of time or a particular time interval, often cited as one of the fundamental aspects of music * Duration (philosophy) – a theory of time and ...

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 Stem or STEM may refer to: Plant structures * Plant stem, a plant's aboveground axis, made of vascular tissue, off which leaves and flowers hang * Stipe (botany), a stalk to support some other structure * Stipe (mycology), the stem of a mushro ...

'', 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 entert ...

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 Willi Apel (10 October 1893 – 14 March 1988) was a German-American musicologist and noted author of a number of books devoted to music. Among his most important publications are the 1944 edition of '' The Harvard Dictionary of Music'' and ''Fre ...

, "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 i ...

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 plainchant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song in Latin (and occasionally Greek) of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in western and central Europe durin ...

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 ne ...

. In the 13th century, chant was sometimes performed according to

rhythmic modes In medieval music, the rhythmic modes were set patterns of long and short durations (or rhythms). The value of each note is not determined by the form of the written note (as is the case with more recent European musical notation), but rather by ...

, roughly equivalent to

meters The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its prefi ...

; however, the note shapes still did not indicate duration in the same way as modern note values.

Mensural notation

Around 1250,

Franco of Cologne Franco of Cologne (; also Franco of Paris) was a German music theorist and possibly a composer. He was one of the most influential theorists of the Late Middle Ages, and was the first to propose an idea which was to transform musical notation per ...

invented different symbols for different durations, although the relation between different note values could vary; three was the most common ratio.

Philippe de Vitry Philippe de Vitry (31 October 1291 – 9 June 1361) was a French composer-poet, bishop and music theorist in the style of late medieval music. An accomplished, innovative, and influential composer, he was widely acknowledged as a leading musi ...

'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 value ...

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 rhythm ...

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 bir ...

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 A chant (from French ', from Latin ', "to sing") is the iterative speaking or singing of words or sounds, often primarily on one or two main pitches called reciting tones. Chants may range from a simple melody involving a limited set of notes ...

. 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