The Daily Book of Classical Music

DAY 77

MUSIC THEORY

Notation of Rhythm and Meter

FASTER AND FASTER

In the staff below, you can see some examples of note duration in 4/4 time, with a whole note, half notes, and quarter, eighth, sixteenth, and thirty-second notes. They can also be written in groups of three called “triplets.” However, music’s basic pulse is more often in groups of two.

Each note is twice as fast as the one preceding it, chopping up the whole note into exponentially smaller and smaller pieces. Each time a visual element is added to a note, it halves the value, as you can see, with the stem added to the whole to make halves, blacking-in for a quarter, and ...