I found a new word, longa, which means a note twice as long as a breve. A written crotchet may look like a hook, if you have a sufficiently vivid imagination.Ħ. It is derived from from Old French crochet, hook, diminutive of croche. A crotchet is defined as (1) An odd, whimsical, or stubborn notion. A quaver is defined as (1) A quivering sound. A half note is equivalent to a molecule or a scruple?Ĥ. An online thesaurus gives the following as synonyms or equivalent words: A tiny amount: bit, crumb, dab, dash, dot, dram, drop, fragment, grain, iota, jot, mite, modicum, molecule, ort, ounce, particle, scrap, scruple, shred, smidgen, speck, tittle, trifle, whit. I also find it interesting that in Great britain, a scruple is a (small) unit of fluid measure. I don't believe that a half note is an insignificantly small portion of any other note. (3) An insignificantly small portion or thing. (b) In Great Britain, 1/20 of a scruple (0.0592 milliliters). A unit of fluid measure, as: (a) In the United States, 1/60 of a fluid dram (0.0616 milliliters). A note equivalent to two whole notes doesn't sound brief to me.Ģ. The word is derived from a Latin word meaning short or brief. Breve is a note equivalent to two whole notes. I did some quick Internet research, and now everything makes even less sense:ġ. Sue said, ".it would make more sense to call crotchets (quarter notes) whole notes because they're each worth one beat." However, in time signatures of x/8, an eighth note is worth one beat.The OED defines "hemidemisemiquaver" as an example in the entry for "hemi-" but does not give any citation.
In 1706, someone named Phillips defines "demisemiquaver" as "The least note in music." By this time of course Bach was using as many beams as he needed so there was no such thing as a "least" note any note could be split in two. An expert in early music notation can clear this up for us. I don't know what the relation of breve and minim was in 1460 perhaps the minim was half of the breve and later became one quarter of the breve. "Semibreve" appears in 1594 "quaver" in 1570 and "semiquaver" in 1576. That would appear to indicate that at the same time they defined the shortest note, they also defined a shorter one! Also "crotchet" appears in 1440 defined as "semiminima". "Maxima", "longa", "breve" and "minim" (longest, long, short, shortest) seem to have appeared around the same time, with a citation of "minim" and "maxima" from 1440 and "longa" and "breve" from 1460. You can't count on it for the very earliest use of a word but it is helpful. I decided to look for evidence of my assertions, so I got out the Oxford English Dictionary which gives dated examples of early use of words.
Demi semi hemi demi semi quaver full#
Now a semi-breve is enough for a full second at MM crotchet=120 and a penny won't buy you half a biscuit.
There was a time when you could buy a good meal for a penny and sing four breves in one second. It's like money inflation, but in reverse. The next smaller note could be used to represent a quavery sound, and after that they just went with every synonym for "half" they could find. A note was invented that looked like a small hook, thus "crotchet". That wasn't short enough, so the smallest possible, or minimal, note was invented: the minim. So the longest note you are ever likely to see in modern music (twice as long as the longest note you usually see) is a "short".Īt some point someone needed a shorter note than the short, thus the "half short", or semi-breve. "Longa" means "long" and "breve" means short. In an early form of notation there were two kinds of notes, long and short.
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