How the Notes Got Their Shapes

 

(entry for 7/5/2024)

There is a wonderful book I own called How the States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein. It explains some of the weird boundary lines we encounter as we explore the various states of the USA, particularly the ‘lower 48,’ as we call them, and most especially such phenomena as the ‘Missouri Boot-heel’ and the little spike at the top of West Virginia.  Et cetera.  With all due apologies to him and his publishers, I’m going to ‘borrow’ the form of his title and apply it to this blog post.

 

We mentioned in an earlier post that modern music notation was invented by a man named Guido d’Arezzo, sometime around 1030AD. We also mentioned that the system he invented did not include rhythm, but only pitch. There were many different shapes to the neumes that he used, but these variations indicated only variations in pitch or intonation, not duration.

 

It became apparent early on that there needed to be a way to indicate rhythm as well as pitch, and by 1100AD or so such a system had been created, by many different people in many different locations, who cooperated with each other and developed compromises that worked pretty well for everyone. (Of course I’m talking about European music here. The Near and Far East had their own systems.)

 

Eventually these musicians settled on five shapes. These were called the Maxima, the Longa, the Breve, the Semi-Breve, and the Minim. You can sort of guess what the first and last ones mean, and probably the second one as well. Breve means ‘brief,’ and Semi-Breve means, more or less, ‘half as long as brief’!

 

Here they all are, arranged from top to bottom in descending order of length. Each one is half the duration of the one above it. Or, to put it another way, each one is twice as long as the one below it. (There are two examples of each note value.) These note shapes did not indicate absolute lengths of time, but relationships to each other. You could go slow, fast, or medium and still keep the relationships intact. (I’ve tried to include lines and spaces both, for variety.)

        Maxima        

Longa

    Breve  (aka Double Whole Note)

    Semi-Breve  (aka Whole Note)

    Minim   (aka Half Note)

That’s it for the original five. Here’s one more that was invented a bit later: 

Crotchet  (aka Quarter Note)

Please notice that the stems of the maxima and longa are always attached to the right side of the note-head, as opposed to all other kinds of stems, which attach to the right side when going up or the left side when going down.

 

Also please notice that when there is a stem present in the note shape, the stem almost always goes down if the note head is on the middle line or higher, and up if the head is lower than that. I say ‘almost always’ because there is an exception that we’ll get to in a later post.

 

By the way, here are three different shapes acceptable for the Breve, here arranged left to right in reverse order of invention. That is, the newest is on the left. I much prefer the old, original, rectangular one. It’s cleaner, and easier to draw.

By the way, that thing at the far right end of the above example is not a note. It's a 'final barline,' and we'll explain barlinies and other phenomena in the next post.

 

Over the centuries, the two longest notes (the maxima and longa) were dropped from use, and as music became more secular and therefore more animated, note ‘values,’ as durations are called, got shorter and shorter. By about 1600 or so we had arrived where we are today, as you will see in a moment.

 

The shortest note of the original five, which in the US is called the ‘half-note,’ and which the rest of the English-speaking world still calls the ‘minim,’ got cut in half in its turn and the result is called the ‘quarter-note’ or ‘crotchet.’ You can see examples of that, above, just below the original five.

 

Of course if you can cut a half-note in half, it makes logical sense that you should be able to cut a quarter note in half as well, and if you do you get this:

It’s called an ‘eighth note’ or ‘quaver.’  (Please be aware that the little ‘flag’ always goes on the right-hand side of the stem, no matter which way the stem is pointing.)

 

Of course, once you’ve established the principal of cutting things in half, you can just keep doing it, over and over.

 

If you cut an eighth note in half, you get a sixteenth note or semi-quaver, and you show this by making the stem longer and putting another flag on the stem.

Guess what it means to add a third flag? You’re right. You get a thirty-second note, or demi-semi-quaver. And a fourth flag indicates a sixty-fourth note or hemi-demi-semi-quaver. (Yikes!)

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Of course a sixty-fourth note is half as long as a thirty-second, which is half as long as a sixteenth. Etc. I could go on and on but you get the idea 

(Recently some composers have begun using ‘One-hundred-twenty-eighth notes, which I suppose was inevitable. I have no idea what they call those in the UK!!! Nor am I going to show you one.) But I’ll bet you already guessed that it has five flags, and you’re right.

 

This is not particularly intuitive! Make the stem longer and longer and add more and more flags to it, to show shorter and shorter durations!?!  Aaargh!  (I never said music notation was entirely logical! But if you learn all this, it works. That’s what matters.)

 

The next-to-last thing you need to know about note shapes (for now) is that if you have two or more identical flagged notes in a row, you connect them with something called ‘beams,’ which take the place of the flags. Here’s what that looks like:

 

Two eighth notes:

 

Four sixteenth notes:

Etc.

 

The very last thing you need to know about note shapes (for now) is that, contrary to popular opinion, a ‘whole note’ (semi-breve) is not formed by merely leaving the stem off a half-note (minim). The two heads are different sizes and are shaped differently. The whole note head is a larger oval than the half-note head, and the whole note head is not tipped, as the half note head is, with its left end slightly lower than its right end. (This same tipping is present in all the solid-color note-heads as well). More importantly, there’s a difference in how the two rounded ‘white’ notes are shaded. The whole note head is shaded on the lower left and upper right. The half note head is shaded on the upper left and lower right. Plus the shading is heavier on the whole note than it is on the half note. As you can see, the whole note is not at all merely the half-note with the stem removed:

Now I will admit that when you’re writing music by hand, you’re not going to take time to observe these miniscule differences, and that’s probably why some people got the idea that whole note and half note heads are the same. But when you’re in a hurry and ignoring those differences, I hope you won’t totally forget about them.

 

In the next post we’re going to explore other aspects of music notation, such as barlines and rests.

 

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