Half note
Encyclopedia : H : HA : HAL : Half note
This page is about the musical note. For the jazz club, see Half Note Club
In music, a half note (American) or minim is a two-beat long note played for half the duration of a whole note and twice the duration of a quarter note (or crotchet).
Half notes are notated with a hollow oval note head (like a whole note) and a straight note stem with no flags (like a quarter note; see Figure 1). The half rest (or minim rest) denotes a silence for the same duration. Half rests are drawn as filled-in rectangles sitting on top of the middle line of the musical staff. As with all notes with stems, half notes are drawn with stems to the right of the notehead, facing up, when they are below the middle line of the staff. When they are on or above the middle line, they are drawn with stems on the left of the note head, facing down.
The note derives from the minima in mensural notation, which is Latin for 'least or smallest,' because at one stage it was the shortest of all note values used. The word minim comes from this name. The American term half note is a 19th-century loan translation of German Halbe Note.
The names of this note (and rest) in European languages vary greatly:
| Language | note name | rest name |
|---|---|---|
| German | Halbe Note | Halbe Pause |
| French | blanche | demi-pause |
| Italian | bianca | pausa di bianca |
| Spanish | blanca | silencio de blanca |
| Portuguese | mínima | pausa de mínima |
The French, Italian and Spanish names for the note (all meaning "white") derive from the fact that the minima was the shortest unfilled note in mensural white notation, which is true as well of the modern form. The form in the earlier black notation resembles the modern quarter note.
{| style="margin:
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.