Musical time values—where did they get their names?
Saturday 27 December 2025 at 22:50
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Edited by Richard Walker, Sunday 28 December 2025 at 18:22
The longest musical note you're likely to meet nowadays is the breve.
In medieval music this was classed as a short note, hence its name, from Latin brevis, "short"; basically the same word as brief. The Latin word is probably, by a regular process of consonant change, derived from a PIE root *mréǵʰus, also meaning short; and surprisingly this may also be the origin of merry. Perhaps the association between something pleasant and something short is the same idea as that expressed by the well-known line
They are not long, the days of wine and roses [1]
In modern music the breve is pretty rare, appearing only occasionally; for example in Brahms's A German Requiem. The longest note in common use is the semibreve, whose meaning is self-explanatory.
Next we have the minim, one half of a semibreve, and called a mimin because it was the minimum, the shortest note. Minimum is from Latin minimus, smallest, thought to be from PIE *mei, "small".
Of course the minim is not the shortest by a long chalk Half a minim is a crochet
The name is taken, presumably in reference to its shape, from a French word crochet, "hook", the origin also of the words crocheting, from the hook used in that craft, and crochety, "irritable, cranky, having eccentric fancies", although I have no idea what the connection is here.
Half a crochet is a quaver. The only explanation I have found for the word's origin is that a quaver is a short note that might get repeated rapidly, so it would sound quavery (possible related to quake?).
But now it's plain sailing: half a quaver is a semiquaver (semi from Latin for half); half a semiquaver is a demisemiquaver (demi from French for half); half a demisemiquaver is a hemidemisemiquaver (hemi from Greek for half).
And it doesn't have to stop there; we can pile on more of the little "flags", as they are called, and repeat the semi-demi-hemi sequence, so this note, of a breve, is hemidemisemihemidemisemiquaver.
of course this is mainly theoretical; the slowest tempo we are likely to meet in reality would make a breve last about 8 seconds, so we'd have to play 128 notes per second to fit them all in, and a frequency that high would become a musical pitch in its own right.
[1] From Vitae Summa Brevis by Ernest Dowson, 1896
Musical time values—where did they get their names?
The longest musical note you're likely to meet nowadays is the breve.
In medieval music this was classed as a short note, hence its name, from Latin brevis, "short"; basically the same word as brief. The Latin word is probably, by a regular process of consonant change, derived from a PIE root *mréǵʰus, also meaning short; and surprisingly this may also be the origin of merry. Perhaps the association between something pleasant and something short is the same idea as that expressed by the well-known line
In modern music the breve is pretty rare, appearing only occasionally; for example in Brahms's A German Requiem. The longest note in common use is the semibreve, whose meaning is self-explanatory.
Next we have the minim, one half of a semibreve, and called a mimin because it was the minimum, the shortest note. Minimum is from Latin minimus, smallest, thought to be from PIE *mei, "small".
Of course the minim is not the shortest by a long chalk Half a minim is a crochet
The name is taken, presumably in reference to its shape, from a French word crochet, "hook", the origin also of the words crocheting, from the hook used in that craft, and crochety, "irritable, cranky, having eccentric fancies", although I have no idea what the connection is here.
Half a crochet is a quaver. The only explanation I have found for the word's origin is that a quaver is a short note that might get repeated rapidly, so it would sound quavery (possible related to quake?).
But now it's plain sailing: half a quaver is a semiquaver (semi from Latin for half); half a semiquaver is a demisemiquaver (demi from French for half); half a demisemiquaver is a hemidemisemiquaver (hemi from Greek for half).
And it doesn't have to stop there; we can pile on more of the little "flags", as they are called, and repeat the semi-demi-hemi sequence, so this note, of a breve, is hemidemisemihemidemisemiquaver.
of course this is mainly theoretical; the slowest tempo we are likely to meet in reality would make a breve last about 8 seconds, so we'd have to play 128 notes per second to fit them all in, and a frequency that high would become a musical pitch in its own right.
[1] From Vitae Summa Brevis by Ernest Dowson, 1896