The hierarchy of rhythm was getting more involved. Yes, during the baroque and classical eras, the composers started adding quicker and quicker notes, partly because there was a good way of indicating them to the musicians, but also, the conception of a bar was changing. And then it came to be that just one of those short ( breve) notes signified a whole bar, and you started adding stems to note marks and filling them in and adding flags to the stems to indicate shorter and shorter notes. That’s right, two whole notes was a short note.Īnd this is where, long before being introduced to physics, I started to understand that time is relative.īack when music first started being written in bars (and drawing rooms and studios, but bars are where the liquid inspiration is), those long notes really were normal notes. Wait, what? So a breve is two whole notes? Yeah! And if you’re a word-oriented person like I was (and am), you will think, “Wait, breve looks like it means ‘brief’, as in ‘short,’” which in fact it does. But then, if you learn as I did, you also learn that they have these fancy-ass names, apparently from the same people who gave us pounds, shillings, pence, halfpennies, farthings, and all that stuff. The ones with tails that are half of those are eighth notes. The notes that are a beat each are quarter notes. But no! It names a note the length of a whole bar. If you’re first learning music in Canada or the US, the odds are not bad that you will think that whole note ought to refer to one of those four black notes with stems that populate a bar. So what would make sense for us to call those? On the other hand, sometimes you split those one-beat notes in half or even quarter. Sometimes you have just one four-beat-long note for a bar.
Sometimes you join those notes together to make a double-length note. “common” time, marked with a C that was in fact originally a half a circle) has four notes, right? One two three four, one two three four, and so on.
A normal bar of music in 4/4 time (a.k.a. I had the advantage of learning in my childhood both systems of naming of musical notes, and the disjunction between them – not to mention their internal systemic weirdness – was one of my early clues that the established adult world was, shall we say, inconsistent. Oh, are those words unfamiliar? Depending on where you’re from, they may be. This is not absolutely true all the way, but look: breve, semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver, semiquaver, demisemiquaver, hemidemisemiquaver. As the notes get shorter, their names get longer.
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