A quarter note (American) or crotchet ( ) (British) is a musical note 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 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 Staff may refer to: Pole * Staff, a weapon used in stick-fighting ** Quarterstaff, a European pole weapon * Staff of office, a pole that indicates a position * Staff (railway signalling), a token authorizing a locomotive driver to use a particula ...

, 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 standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

symbol is U+2669 (♩). A quarter rest (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. 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 intel ...

, 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 ...

(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 ...

usually use a term derived from the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, 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 ...

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