{"id":17187,"date":"2018-12-12T14:16:08","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T13:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=17187"},"modified":"2018-12-12T14:16:08","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T13:16:08","slug":"crotchets-quavers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=17187","title":{"rendered":"Crotchets &#038; Quavers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/notes.gif\" style=\"float:right; margin:0 0 20px 50px;\" alt=\"An illustration of musical notes\" width=\"220\" height=\"400\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Yesterday I finally worked out how to create musical scores on my computer (using <a href=\"https:\/\/musescore.org\/en\">musescore<\/a>). It&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve tried before, but couldn&#8217;t get the hang of. So now I&#8217;m going write out all the tunes I&#8217;ve composed. As I&#8217;m doing this, I thought I&#8217;d look into the names of some musical notes and their origins.<\/p>\n<p>The commonly-used types of musical notes are shown in the image. Their names are different in British English and American English. The American English names are self-explanatory, and a bit boring. The British English ones are more interesting, so let&#8217;s look at where they come from:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A <strong>semibreve<\/strong> is the longest note in common-use. The <strong>breve<\/strong>, or double whole note, does exist, but is quite rare. The word breve comes from the Old French <em>brieve \/ breve<\/em> (brief), from the Latin <em>brevis<\/em> (short) &#8211; in medieval music the <em>brevis<\/em> was one of the shortest notes. A <strong>semibreve<\/strong> is half the length of a breve.<\/li>\n<li>A <strong>minim<\/strong> is half the length of a semibreve, and comes from the French <em>minime<\/em> (minimal), from the Latin <em>minimus<\/em> (smallest, shortest, youngest), a superlative of <em>minor<\/em> (smaller) from the Proto-Indo-European <em>*mey-<\/em> (few, small).<\/li>\n<li>A <strong>crotchet<\/strong> is half the length of a minim, and comes from the Old French <em>crochet<\/em> (little hook), a diminutive of <em>croc<\/em>, from the Frankish <em>*kr\u014dk<\/em> (hook) or from Old Norse <em>kr\u00f3kr<\/em> (hook, bend, bight), from the Proto-Germanic <em>*kr\u014dkaz<\/em> (hook), from Proto-Indo-European <em>*gerg-<\/em> (tracery, basket, twist).<\/li>\n<li>A <strong>quaver<\/strong> is half the length of a crotchet, and comes from the Middle English <em>quaveren<\/em>, a form of <em>quaven \/ cwavien<\/em> (to tremble), from <em>quave<\/em> (a shaking, trembling)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A <strong>semiquaver<\/strong> is half the length of a quaver, and a <strong>demisemiquaver<\/strong> is half the length of a semiquaver. Shorter, and less commonly-used notes include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Hemidemisemiquaver<\/strong> or <strong>64th note<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Semihemidemisemiquaver<\/strong> or <strong>quasihemidemisemiquaver<\/strong> or <strong>128th note<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Demisemihemidemisemiquaver<\/strong> or <strong>256th note<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sources: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_musical_symbols\">Wikipedia<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\">Wiktionary<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.etymonline.com\/word\/minim\">Online Etymology Dictionary<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I finally worked out how to create musical scores on my computer (using musescore). It&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve tried before, but couldn&#8217;t get the hang of. So now I&#8217;m going write out all the tunes I&#8217;ve composed. As I&#8217;m doing this, I thought I&#8217;d look into the names of some musical notes and their origins. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,110,111,10,15,26,29,34,36,44,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-frankish","category-french","category-language","category-latin","category-middle-english","category-music","category-old-french","category-old-norse","category-proto-germanic","category-proto-indo-european"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}