The OED defines "hemidemisemiquaver" as an example in the entry for "hemi-" but does not give any citation. In 1706, someone named Phillips defines "demisemiquaver" as "The least note in music." By this time of course Bach was using as many beams as he needed so there was no such thing as a "least" note any note could be split in two. An expert in early music notation can clear this up for us. I don't know what the relation of breve and minim was in 1460 perhaps the minim was half of the breve and later became one quarter of the breve. Email or Phone: Password: Forgot account People named Semi Demi Hemi Quaver. Join Facebook to connect with Semi Demi Hemi Quaver and others you may know. "Semibreve" appears in 1594 "quaver" in 1570 and "semiquaver" in 1576. View the profiles of people named Semi Demi Hemi Quaver. That would appear to indicate that at the same time they defined the shortest note, they also defined a shorter one! Also "crotchet" appears in 1440 defined as "semiminima". "Maxima", "longa", "breve" and "minim" (longest, long, short, shortest) seem to have appeared around the same time, with a citation of "minim" and "maxima" from 1440 and "longa" and "breve" from 1460. You can't count on it for the very earliest use of a word but it is helpful. I decided to look for evidence of my assertions, so I got out the Oxford English Dictionary which gives dated examples of early use of words. Now a semi-breve is enough for a full second at MM crotchet=120 and a penny won't buy you half a biscuit. There was a time when you could buy a good meal for a penny and sing four breves in one second. It's like money inflation, but in reverse. The next smaller note could be used to represent a quavery sound, and after that they just went with every synonym for "half" they could find. A note was invented that looked like a small hook, thus "crotchet". That wasn't short enough, so the smallest possible, or minimal, note was invented: the minim. So the longest note you are ever likely to see in modern music (twice as long as the longest note you usually see) is a "short".Īt some point someone needed a shorter note than the short, thus the "half short", or semi-breve. Which is why you see the notes above in the following order. The prefixes semi, demi, and hemi all just mean half and they all are applied in that order when referring to something smaller. "Longa" means "long" and "breve" means short. As you can see in the British naming scheme, the quaver is the smallest unit. In an early form of notation there were two kinds of notes, long and short.
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