Whole note

How to read it

The whole note has an open head and no stem. Two half notes, four quarter notes or eight eighth notes last as long as one whole note. In 4/4, the commonest Time signature today, a whole note fills a whole measure. A longer note, the double whole note or breve, exists but is rare.

Also searched as: semibreve.

British and American names

American books such as Gehrkens’s Music Notation and Terminology (1914) name notes by fractions of a whole note: whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth. Gehrkens gives semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver and semiquaver as the English names, and those are the names British books such as Richardson’s Elements of Music (1893) use. The fraction names match the German ones, which Stainer and Barrett’s dictionary (1898) gives as whole note, half note and quarter note, counting from the semibreve.

Why a whole note is a “half-short”

The British name is older than the modern note. In the measured music of the Middle Ages the long note was the longa, and two shorter forms became the breve and the semibreve, “short” and “half-short”. The longa has died out, the breve survives as the rare double whole note, and the semibreve is the modern whole note. Stainer and Barrett’s dictionary describes the medieval semibreve as a diamond-shaped note; rounder shapes came later because they were easier to write.