musical note
In music, notes are distinct and isolatable sounds that act as the most basic building blocks for nearly all of music. This musical analysis#Discretization, discretization facilitates performance, comprehension, and musical analysis, analysis. No ...
played for one quarter of the duration of 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). Quarter notes are notated with a filled-in oval note head and a straight, flagless
stem
Stem or STEM most commonly refers to:
* Plant stem, a structural axis of a vascular plant
* Stem group
* Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
Stem or STEM can also refer to:
Language and writing
* Word stem, part of a word respon ...
. The stem usually points upwards if it is below the middle line of the staff, and downwards if it is on or above the middle line. An upward stem is placed on the right side of the notehead, a downward stem is placed on the left (see image). The
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
symbol is U+2669 (♩).
A quarter
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 ...
(or crotchet rest) denotes a silence of the same duration as a quarter note or crotchet. It is notated with the symbol . In some older music it was notated with symbol .''Rudiments and Theory of Music'' Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, London 1958. I,33 and III,25. The former section shows both forms without distinction, the latter the "old" form only. The book was the Official ABRSM theory manual in the UK up until at least 1975. The "old" form was taught as a manuscript variant of the printed form.
History
The quarter note equates to the ('half minim') of
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 word "crotchet" comes from
Old French
Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th black notation of the medieval period.
As the name implies, a quarter note's duration is one quarter that of a whole note, half the length of a half note, and twice that of an eighth note. It represents one beat in a bar of time. The term "quarter note" is a calque (loan-translation) of the German term .
In the Romance languages of Catalan, French, Galician, and Spanish, the name of this note and its equivalent rest is derived from the Latin language, Latin meaning 'black'—as the was the longest note to be colored in mensural notation, mensural white notation. This is still true of the note's modern form. The Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian and Slovak names mean "quarter" (for the note) and "quarter's pause" (for the rest).
See also
*
List of musical symbols
Musical symbols are marks and symbols in musical notation that indicate various aspects of how a piece of music is to be performed. There are symbols to communicate information about many musical elements, including Pitch (music), pitch, Duration ...