A quarter note (American) or crotchet ( ) (British) is a

musical note In music, a note is the representation of a musical sound. Notes can represent the Pitch (music), pitch and Duration (music), duration of a sound in musical notation. A note can also represent a pitch class. Notes are the building blocks of much ...

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 o ...

(or semibreve). Quarter notes are notated with a filled-in oval

note head 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 b ...

and a straight, flagless

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 ...

. 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, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

symbol is U+2669 (♩). A quarter

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 ...

(or crotchet rest) denotes a silence of the same duration as a quarter note. It typically appears as the symbol crotchet rest alt plain-svg

, or occasionally, as the older symbol crotchet rest plain-svg

.''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 note derives from the ('half minim') of

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 ...

. The word "crotchet" comes from

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligib ...

, meaning 'little hook', diminutive of , 'hook', because of the hook used on the note in black notation. The quarter note is played for half the length of a half note and twice that of an eighth note. It is one beat in a bar of . The term "quarter note" is a

calque In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language wh ...

(loan translation) of the German term . The names of this note (and rest) in many other languages are

d from the same source;

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...

usually use a term derived from the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

meaning 'black': The Catalan, French, Galician, and Spanish names for the note (all of them meaning 'black') derive from the fact that the was the longest note to be colored in mensural white notation, which is true as well of the 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).

Notes

References

{{Musical note values Note values

History

See also

Notes

References