I. Fundamentals
Notating Rhythm
Mark Gotham; Chelsey Hamm; and Bryn Hughes
Key Takeaways
- Notes consist of several different components, including a notehead, stem, beam, and flag.
- Common note values include the whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, and sixteenth note.
- Common rest values include the whole rest, half rest, quarter rest, eighth rest, and sixteenth rest.
- British terms for rhythmic values are different from American terms.
- A dot increases the duration of a note by half. Subsequent dots add half the duration of the previous dot.
- A tie connects two or more notes of the same pitch. Do not rearticulate any “tied to” notes.
Music is a temporal art—in other words, time is one of its components—so organizing time is essential for Western musical notation. The next several chapters will focus on the temporal facets of rhythm and meter, starting in this chapter with the basic note and rest values in this notation system.
Note Values
Broadly speaking, rhythm refers to the duration of musical sounds and rests in time. As you’ll recall in the chapter titled Notation of Notes, Clefs, and Ledger Lines, notes may contain several different components, as seen in :
There are many common note values in Western musical notation. Note values are hierarchical; in other words, their lengths are defined relative to one another. Each note value can be divided into two smaller values, as seen in . Just as a whole pizza divides into two halves, four quarters, eight eighths, etc., a whole note divides into two half notes, four quarter notes, eight eighth notes, and so on.
Pay special attention to these aspects of
:- Noteheads can be filled in (black) or unfilled (white); quarter notes and shorter durations are filled in.
- Unfilled noteheads may or may not have a stem, but filled noteheads always have stems.
- Flags are only added to the stems of filled noteheads.
Additionally, there are three ways to decrease a note’s value by half:
- Adding a stem to a note (i.e., whole to half)
- Filling in a notehead (i.e., half to quarter)
- Adding a flag (i.e., quarter to eighth or eighth to sixteenth)
Open Music Theory privileges the North American names for note values, but it’s worth being familiar with the British names as well (indicated in parentheses below). See
for a visual of each note value.- Whole note (semibreve in British English): this thick, unfilled oval shape has no stem. In many compositions today, this is the longest note value used.
- Half note (minim in British English): also an oval, drawn with a slightly thinner line, and has a stem. This note is half as long as the whole note (i.e., two half notes make up one whole note).
- Quarter note (crotchet in British English): looks like the half note, except that the notehead has been filled in. This note is half as long as a half note (i.e., two quarter notes make up one half note) and a quarter as long as a whole note (i.e., four quarter notes make up one whole note).
- Eighth note