Fundamentals
8 Rhythmic and Rest Values
Chelsey Hamm; Mark Gotham; 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 the sixteenth note.
- Common rest values include the whole rest, half rest, quarter rest, eighth rest and the sixteenth rest.
- British terms for note and rest 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. That being the case, organizing time is essential for Western musical notation. Two temporal facets will be focused on in the next several chapters; rhythm and meter. This chapter focuses on the basic rhythmic and rest values in Western musical notation.
Rhythmic 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 rhythmic values in Western musical notation. Rhythmic values are hierarchical; in other words, their lengths are relative to one another. Each rhythmic value can be divided into two subsequent rhythmic values, as seen in :
It is easy to think about these relationships like a pizza. A whole pizza divides into two halves, four quarters, eight eighths, etc. Likewise, a whole note divides into two halves, four quarters, eight eighths and so on.
Several additional aspects of
should be noted:- 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 duration by half:
- Adding a stem to a note (i.e. whole to half) decreases a note’s duration by half.
- Filling in a notehead (i.e. half to quarter) decreases a note’s duration by half.
- Adding a flag (i.e. quarter to eighth or eighth to sixteenth) decreases a note’s duration by half.
Please note that Open Music Theory privileges the North American names for rhythmic values. Below, each rhythmic value will be discussed, and will be identified with the British name in parentheses; 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 notes is half as long as the whole note (i.e. two half notes make up one whole note).
- Quarter note (crotchet in British Engli