5: Note Values

We just talked about a time signature in the last article, so now let’s talk about the note values those time signatures govern.

The longest value you’ll typically see is that of a whole note, which has the value of 4 quarters, or 2 halves, or 8 eighths, and so on, and it looks like this:

Half as long as a whole, naturally, is a half note:
Half as long as a half is a quarter:
Half as long is an eighth:

Half as long is a sixteenth:
Half as long is a thirty-second:

The circular part of the note is called its “head,” and the vertical part is its stem. Starting with eighths, there are in increasing number of “flags” that come off the side of the note. One more flag, twice as fast. When you have multiples of the same type, you don’t have a bunch of rogue flags, but instead you connect the notes with that many beams, like this, from the very first thing I ever learned to play:

Suzuki Violin Book 1 No.1 Twinkle Little Star Variation A Sheet Music

 In each bar, there are four sixteenths beamed together, then two eighths, then four more sixteenths and two more eighths. 

Any ordering and combination of note values is legal, so long as the total values of the notes in the measure exactly matches what is prescribed by the time signature.

A little more than a year after I learned Twinkle Twinkle (see above), I learned this song (the Suzuki book calls it "May Song," but I've since come to find out it's an old German folk song that tells a funny story about a farmer who gets mad at a fox who steals his goose.)


Notice the dots to the right of the A and the D, the first notes in measures 1 and 3. When placed like that-- immediately to the right of some value-- a dot adds 50% of the value. A quarter note is worth 1 quarter note (of course), but a dotted quarter is worth 1.5 quarter notes. Of course, just like flags or beams, there is no limit to how many dots one can put (although practically the highest number I've seen in 20 years is 3). 

In the case of 2 dots math works like this: 

  • A quarter note is worth one
  • A dotted quarter is worth 1.5 because the quarter is worth 1 and the dot is worth half of 1
  • A *double* dotted quarter is worth 1.75-- because the original quarter is 1, the first dot adds 1/2, and the second dot adds half of the value of whatever is to its immediate left (another dot), so it adds 1/4, so the total value is 1 plus a half plus a quarter = 1 and 3/4 beats. 
Those of you who are mathematically inclined will notice that, theoretically, an infinite number of dots doubles the value, since you add an extra 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + ... and if you take this sum to infinity, it equals 1-- so the additional value is the original value of what was infinitely-dotted, so something infinitely-dotted is worth twice that same thing with no dots at all. (But at that point, why bother? Just use the much more convenient symbol that's predefined.)

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

35: Figured Bass

Image
  There’s a system of notating harmonies that’s rather unique to the Baroque era, but which is so frequently used there, and so important to it, that no discussion of theory would ever be complete if we did not cover it. This is the notation of figured bass: “figured,” in the sense of using figures (numbers) to notate the bass. Figured bass was, in a sense, its own notation completely separate from the five lines and four spaces of the staff, which was nearly exclusively the purview of cellists, bassists, harpsichords, and organists.  Figured bass, fair warning, can be intimidating at first. But, just as with anything else we’ve covered so far, the more you practice reading it, the better you’ll get.  In this system, we use numbers to indicate intervals above the bass. We stack them, and this is how we build chords. If you can’t stack them, nowadays, it’s perfectly fine to use slashes and write the numbers horizontally.  Let’s start with the easiest figured bass nota...
Read more

58: Swell pedals and swell shades

There’s one pedal that we haven’t discussed on the organ because it isn’t one of the “note” pedals—in fact, it’s the only one that doesn’t have a pitch. Instead, the missing pedal is the swell pedal. Look at the body of the organ (the assembly of where all the pipes are, as opposed to the “console”, where the organist sits and plays the instrument—these may or may not be physically close to each other), and you’ll probably see what kind of look like plantation shutters. (If you know where my parish is, then this feature of the organ is very clearly visible on ours. Your local organ might not be so obvious.) These shutters, called “swell shutters/shades,” show or hide the pipes of the organ. Organs have instantaneous dynamic control—the amount of pressure you put on a key dictates how much air flows through the pipes, just like a piano allows you to adjust dynamics on the fly by changing the amount of pressure with which the hammer hits the string(s) given the pressure on the key. Thes...
Read more

54: Trills in the Baroque vs. Classical Periods

Image
Baroque music is known for its incredibly technical and ornamented style. The most common and fundamental of those ornaments is our focus today: the trill. Most simply, a trill is a very fast, repeated alternation of two notes. In the vast majority of cases, those notes are adjacent, but that is not a requirement. Given how fast and common they are, regardless of what you play—whether it’s a string, wind, or keyboard instrument, or your voice—they have a reputation for being quite tiring to play. The period matters when considering a trill. Classical and later composers treat trills, in a sense, in the opposite manner than Baroque composers do. Let me show you two examples: First, the Baroque way of thinking. This is a PAC:   and especially in the Baroque era, when the plucked harpsichord dominated over the hammered piano, it was hard to sustain sounds for long since the sound of the plucking decays quickly. The trill was developed in response, out of a need both to ornam...
Read more