Note value

In music notation, the relative duration of a note is shown by its note value, which is determined by the notehead’s shape or texture, whether it has a stem, and whether it includes flags, beams, hooks, or tails. When no modifiers are applied, note values follow a pattern of fractional powers of two—for example, one, one-half, one-fourth, and so forth. A rest marks a silence lasting the same amount of time as a corresponding note value.

Theoretically, notes can be made shorter indefinitely by adding more flags, though such extremely short notes are uncommon. The breve appears in several different forms. Sometimes the longa or breve is used to represent a very long note of indefinite length, such as at the end of a piece like Mozart’s Mass KV 192. A single eighth note or any faster note always has a stem with flags, while two or more such notes are usually joined by beams. When a stem is present, it can point upward from the right side of the notehead or downward from the left side, except for the longa or maxima, which nearly always have downward stems. Typically, the stem goes down if the notehead is on or above the center line, and up otherwise. Flags always appear on the right side of the stem.

A note value can be lengthened by adding a dot after it, which adds the next shorter note value, making the total one and a half times the original duration. With multiple dots (n), the note is extended by 2n − 1/2n of its value: two dots add two lower note values, resulting in one and three-quarters the original duration; three dots, though rare, make it one and seven-eighths, and so on. The double dot was first used in 1752 by J. J. Quantz. In 18th-century and earlier music, the dot’s augmentation could vary—sometimes more or less than the modern interpretation—to fit the musical context. The vertical double dot, introduced by Willi Apel, appears in modern transcriptions of medieval and renaissance music written in mensural notation. It is used for a note worth nine beats that fills a full bar in 9/8 or 9/4 meter. The second dot lengthens an already dotted note by half again: for example, a dotted half note (minim) worth six quarter notes becomes nine quarter notes. Without this device, such a value would require a dotted half note tied to a dotted quarter note. To divide a note value into three equal parts or another non-binary division, tuplets are used, though swung notes and notes inégales are also relevant.

In early Gregorian chant manuscripts, note heads of various shapes and notes with or without stems appear, but many scholars agree these symbols do not indicate different durations, though the dot was used for augmentation. Chant was sometimes performed in rhythmic modes roughly equivalent to meters in the 13th century, but the note shapes still did not convey duration as modern note values do. Around 1250, Franco of Cologne created distinct symbols for different durations, though the ratio between values could vary, with three being most common. Philippe de Vitry’s treatise *Ars nova* (1320) described a system where note value ratios could be 2:1 or 3:1, using mensural time signatures to distinguish them. This black mensural notation gave way to white mensural notation around 1450, where all note values used white (outline) noteheads. In white notation, triplets were indicated by coloration—filling in noteheads to make them black (or sometimes red). Both black and white notation periodically used ligatures, a holdover from the clivis and porrectus neumes of chant. Around 1600, the modern notational system was generally adopted, along with barlines and the practice of writing multipart music in scores rather than individual parts, though old usages occasionally appeared in the 17th century.

The British names for note values date back at least to English renaissance music, and the Latin-derived terms were internationally used at that time. *Longa* means “long,” while many other names indicate relative shortness: *breve* comes from Latin *brevis* (“short”), *minim* from *minimus* (“very small”), and *quaver* refers to the quavering effect of very fast notes. The prefixes *semi-*, *demi-*, and *hemi-* mean “half” in Latin, French, and Greek, respectively. The chain of semantic shift—where notes originally perceived as short gradually came to be long—is interesting both linguistically and musically. The *crotchet* is named after the shape of the note, from Old French for a “little hook,” and the same may be argued for the *minim*, since the word is also used in palaeography to mean a vertical stroke in medieval handwriting.