La emancipación juvenil: del concepto a su medida

Different lengths of note

Our two songs involve notes of various lengths and we use different symbols to indicate how long each note is compared to the others. The note symbols and their names were agreed upon centuries ago and are listed below. As you can see, the notes get shorter in a very organized way: we start with a very long note (or “breve”) and divide it in half to get a half note (or semibreve), then continue dividing the length of the notes in half to get shorter and shorter notes. Nowadays we also talk about “whole notes” and “quarter notes” and, just to confuse everyone, it has come to be generally accepted that the semibreve, not the breve, should be counted as a whole note—as you can see in the illustration.

Symbol Name

Breve

Semibreve (whole note)

Minim (half note)

Crotchet (quarter note)

Quaver (eighth note)

Semiquaver (sixteenth note)

Demisemiquaver

Hemidemisemiquaver (no, I am not joking)

A list of the different symbols for notes of different lengths. Each note is twice as long as the one below it.

If this “halving” system was all we had to describe the length of notes, then our music would be rather dull rhythmically, so we have a couple of additions to give us more flexibility:

1. A dot written immediately after a note means “this note should sound one and a half times as long as normal” (you can see such a dot after the

note for “fe” in “fellow”). A double dot after the note is much less common but means “this note should sound for one and three quarters as long as usual.”

2. You can write a small “3” above a group of three notes to indicate that

“these three notes should take up the same amount of time as two notes would normally.” This is a fairly common device and you will have heard it in action many times. Rather less common is the writing of “5” above a group of five notes, or any other similar combination. In every case the message is, “this group of notes should be squeezed into the amount of time allowed for a group of this size minus one,” i.e., 5 should only take as long as 4 usually would, 13 should take as long as 12 usually would, etc.

Sometimes notes are written as individuals (this is common for singing) but more often the shorter notes are joined to others to make little groups, as you can see in the songs. This joining together doesn’t affect the length of the note—it just helps the musician to read the music.

The shorter notes are usually joined together by their “tails” rather than written individually. The two quavers drawn above (on the left) each have a single tail and would be joined by a single straight line (as on the right of the illustration). Semiquavers have two tails, so they are joined by two lines, and so on.

Looking back to the notes for “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and referring to the list above, you can see that the notes for “have” and “you” are half as long as those for “black” and “sheep,” which are, in turn, half as long as the note for “wool.” You might have thought that the notes you were

singing were just randomly longer or shorter—but you are in fact singing notes whose lengths are closely related to each other.

Stress or emphasis: the use of bar lines

“Baa Baa Black Sheep” is a simple song but it would be simple to the point of dullness if all the notes were the same length and they all had equal emphasis. You will notice that there are vertical lines drawn on the stave at a regular distance apart, which do not have any note or sound associated with them. These are called bar lines. The distance between two bar lines (where we write the notes) is technically called a measure—

but everyone I’ve ever met calls it a bar so that’s the word I’ll use.

One of the conventions of written music is that the first note after a bar line is given extra emphasis, or stress. When you sing “Baa Baa Black Sheep” you stress the first “Baa,” the word “have” and the first “yes.” In the written version of the music, these words appear just after a bar line.

If you haven’t noticed that you emphasize in this way, try singing the song with deliberate stress on “sheep” and “any.” It all sounds a bit Monty Python, doesn’t it? Now sing it again with the emphasis where it should be—on “Baa” and “have.” You may now be over-emphasizing but the stress is in the right place—just after the bar line—so it sounds OK.

Now, without looking at the written music, sing the first line of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” a couple of times. It’s only six words, but it involves eight notes: For, he’s, a, jo, lly, good, fe, llow. Imagine that you are singing the song in a funny/dramatic way to a friend. For extra effect you have brought a cymbal with you. The noise from a cymbal lasts a long time so you will only hit it once in every line of the song. Sing the song aloud a couple of times and imagine which of the eight sounds you would choose to hit the cymbal on. Will it be “For,” “he’s,” “a,” “jo,”

“lly,” “good,” “fe” or “llow?” Using my mysterious powers, I can confidently tell you that you will have chosen to make your big crashing noise on either “he’s” or “fe.” Now have a look at the music—yes, “he’s”

and “fe” are both immediately after a bar line.

In many cases we would automatically choose the first note of the song as one of the notes to be emphasized. In “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” for example, you would have clashed your cymbal on the first word, “Baa,”

or the word “have.” In the case of “For he’s…,” however, we would not choose the first note “For” because it does not come immediately after a bar line—the song does not start at the beginning of a bar. Just in front of the word “For” there is what musicians call a “rest,” a mark (in this case two marks) indicating that the first part of the bar is silent. This may sound a little weird—starting a tune with a silence—but we do it to get all the stresses in the song or tune to fall in the correct place, just after the bar lines. Here are a few examples of songs with the accented syllables printed in bold type.

Tunes which start at the beginning of a bar:

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star…) Frère Jacques (Frère Jacques Frère Jacques dormez vous…) London Bridge is Falling Down (London Bridge is…)

Tunes which don’t start at the beginning of a bar:

When the Saints Come Marching In (Oh, when the Saints…) On Top of Old Smoky (On top of Old Smoky…)

Auld Lang Syne (Should old acquaintance be forgot…) Greensleeves (Alas my love…)

If you ever see these tunes written down you will see that the bar lines come immediately before the syllables I have highlighted.