Why is the "longest note value still in common use" called a "breve", when breve means "short"?

Question

This Wikipedia page says that the double whole note, or breve, is the "longest note value still in common use".

However, breve in Italian means 'short'.

How did the longest commonly-used note value come to be called 'short'?

There is an answer to http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/35917/how-are-note-durations-named-in-the-british-system, that does mention this, but it doesn't give a lot of detail on this particular point. — Нет войне, Dec 24 '15 at 13:16
This is something to ponder upon. However,' breve in common use'. I'd have said semibreve. After all, in U.S. it's a whole note. — Tim, Dec 24 '15 at 13:17
Yeah if all the non-Americans would get with the program on note length names, this would all be so less confusing. ;-) — Todd Wilcox, Dec 24 '15 at 13:58
@ToddWilcox - I can't understand why a crotchet is a quarter note, necessarily. Quarter of a semibreve, but so what? Three-quarter time for waltz? What about 5/4? I firmly consider a crotchet to be a ONE BEAT NOTE, but that's just me... — Tim, Dec 24 '15 at 14:06
*breve* is Italian and means short. No need to look for latin when most music related terms are directly Italian terms. — Bakuriu, Dec 24 '15 at 14:14
@Tim I also am confused by what a "crotchet" is supposed to be. It sure doesn't sound musical. — Todd Wilcox, Dec 24 '15 at 21:15
@ToddWilcox - only just picked this up! For your information, a crotchet is one of four note lengths contained within a bar (measure!) in 4/4. There is no reason why it, or any other musical term needs to 'sound musical'. I suppose I could justify it in terms of - well, lots of musical names are derived from 'foreign' words - at least it comes from the French for a 'hook', so it's descriptive, if nothing else. I don't believe you think 'quarter note' sounds remotely musical - apart from the 'note' bit... But, maybe I'm like a metronome - you can wind me up. Yes,there are mechanical ones too..! — Tim, Mar 22 '18 at 22:16
@Bakuriu but in this case the word originated before the Italian language was clearly distinct from Latin, so it really is an anglicized Latin word (or French, according to one of my dictionaries) rather than an Italian word. This is in sharp contrast to most musical terms such as _allegro_ or _legato,_ etc. — phoog, May 06 '22 at 09:57
@ToddWilcox - re-visiting 4 yrs later - 'crotchet' seems now to be a bit of a misnomer. The French for a quaver is 'croche' - making more sense, as at least it's hook shaped, quite unlike the crotchet in reality. But, having spent a lifetime immersed in crotchets and quavers, etc., they have a certain draw for me! — Tim, Sep 08 '22 at 06:21

Tim · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-24T13:31:45.373

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It does mean 'short'. In medieval mensural notation, it was a short note, either one third or half as long as a LONGA. It appears there were only two note lengths, breve and longa from 13th up to the 17th Century, reflecting the syllable sung. The longa is obviously a longer note length... Music may have been much slower then!

edited Dec 24 '15 at 13:31

answered Dec 24 '15 at 13:26

Tim

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longa_(music) says of the *longa* that by the 17th century "changes in notational practice had rendered it too extended a value for practical use" but I'm still interested in how that came to be - we still *have* long notes, after all! There's even a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_(music) too... – Нет войне Dec 24 '15 at 13:36
@topomorto - called the breve, as it was a short note at the time. I suppose as written music developed, it was realised that actually, that short note just wasn't short enough, thus semi-breve (which existed, I think) was not even short enough - unless the tempo was very quick,- but even then, shorter duration notes needed to be invented. Bit like, 100 years ago, 'billion' was hardly ever used, so trillion, etc, weren't needed. Opposite idea, true, but analogous. – Tim Dec 24 '15 at 14:02
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Would that be because notation was only originally used for slow choral music, but began to be used for other musics too? – Нет войне Dec 24 '15 at 14:26
@topomorto - I'm guessing so. Timing was probably not much of an issue in 12th C. Although, by 17th C. it must have been, surely? – Tim Dec 24 '15 at 14:35
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@topomorto There seems to been a period of "note inflation": "Despite these nominal equivalences, each note had a much shorter temporal value than its modern counterpart. Between the 14th and 16th centuries, composers repeatedly introduced new note shapes for ever smaller temporal divisions of rhythm, and the older, longer notes were slowed down in proportion. [...] Thus, what was originally the shortest of all note values used, the semibreve, has become the longest note used routinely today, the whole note." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensural_notation#Note_values – Ross Ridge Dec 24 '15 at 19:32
Although modern choral music generally one note per syllable, music was not always written thus, and some liturgical music still isn't. In some services, psalms will be sung with an eight note pattern using four notes per verse, regardless of the number of syllables. Each verse has two halves, with the last few syllable or syllables of each half being emphasized by changing to the next note: The first eight notes of Psalm 23, for example, would be "The Lord is my *shepherd*; I shall not *want*. He maketh me to lie down in green *pastures*; he leadeth me beside still *waters*." – supercat Mar 25 '19 at 18:13
Thus, even if music is sung at a tempo where a longa would last several seconds, that doesn't mean every syllable lasts that long. – supercat Mar 25 '19 at 18:14
@supercat - don't know if the comment is meant for me, but even so, writing notes for words, which essentially is the case, what would have been used shorter than a breve? – Tim Mar 25 '19 at 18:32
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@Tim: In the Psalm 23 example, the first portion of each line could have been a "longa", and the italicized portion a "breve". While the sung syllables of the "breve" would often have been longer than those of the "longa", the total duration of the "breve" would have been shorter. – supercat Mar 25 '19 at 19:18
"appears there were only two note lengths, breve and longa from 13th up to the 17th Century": I don't know where you got this idea from, but it's woefully incorrect. The semibreve was invented in the 13th century. By the end of the 16th century not only do you also have semiminims, but there was already the practice of adding any number of flags to note stems to create arbitrarily short divisions. And further to @supercat's point, the practice of singing polyphony with multiple notes per syllable was already established [by the end of the 12th century](https://youtu.be/3oaRM1uDsw8). – phoog Nov 18 '22 at 11:56
Also, various parts wouldn't have the same mensuration -- the same measure of time, akin to a time signature, but also establishing the tempo -- so the cantus firmus would be in slow notes where a breve might be twice as long as the other parts' longs. (For those who don't want to follow the link in my previous comment, it's Perotin's Viderunt omnes in a video with a score in modern notation such that each of the first two syllables persists for about ten measures. Here's [_Sederunt principes_ with a manuscript score](https://youtu.be/xCTo6pVHZkM).) – phoog Nov 18 '22 at 12:08

score 12 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 25 '15 at 10:29

Our musical notation evolved over a very long time, during which it became increasingly detailed. This meant that innovation tended to happen at the short end of the time-scale, which probably explains the "inflation" which occurred during the middle ages and early renaissance.

I'm not sure there was ever a time when there were just two values. The story starts with "neumes", which represent whole groups of notes - to the extent that these neumes can be decomposed into individual notes there are many more than two note-shapes, and this visual variety was probably intended to suggest something about the articulation of the notes. In some of the early writings about rhythm the authors can only say that certain notes are "long" and others "short", but this surely reflects the lack of a conceptual framework within which they could speak more precisely rather than implying that only two durations existed.

The idea that a particular note-form (glyph) would exactly correspond to a particular duration (relative to the basic pulse) comes rather late in musical history, and probably only made sense once our ways of measuring and perceiving time had evolved into something close to what we have now. In the 12th century there was no mechanical timepiece which went tick-tock, no unified theory of time which linked musical durations with the hours of the day in one continuum ... there was time, there was music, but there was no 4' 33".

score 6 · Answer 3 · edited May 06 '22 at 10:04

Our modern notation of music evolved from the so-called mensural notation, used up to about 1600. This system had a complicated ligature system (unlike our pretty straightforward note stems today) and a system to break up note values into two or three parts, unlike our system today where the next smallest note types are always half the length of the previous (whole note, half note, quarter note, etc. in American parlance).

The Wikipedia page has a fascinating table showing how note values used from the 13th to 17th centuries has gradually gotten shorter:

Here is the quote from the Wikipedia page, which cites Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–1600:

The system of note types used in mensural notation closely corresponds to the modern system. The mensural brevis is nominally the ancestor of the modern double whole note (breve); likewise, the semibrevis corresponds to the whole note (semibreve), the minima to the half note (minim), the semiminima to the quarter note (crotchet), and the fusa to the eighth note (quaver). Very rarely, mensural notation also used yet smaller subdivisions, such as the semifusa (corresponding to the sixteenth note or semiquaver). On the other hand, there were also two larger values, the longa (quadruple whole note or long) and the maxima (or duplex longa, called a large in Britain), which are no longer in regular use today.

Despite these nominal equivalences, each note had a much shorter temporal value than its modern counterpart. Between the 14th and 16th centuries, composers repeatedly introduced new note shapes for ever smaller temporal divisions of rhythm, and the older, longer notes were slowed down in proportion. The basic metrical relationship of a long to a short beat shifted from longa–breve in the 13th century, to breve–semibreve in the 14th, to semibreve–minim by the end of the 15th, and finally to minim–semiminim (i.e., half and quarter notes, or minim and crotchet) in modern notation. Thus, what was originally the shortest of all note values used, the semibreve, has become the longest note used routinely today, the whole note.

Originally, all notes were written in solid, filled-in form ("black notation"). In the mid-15th century, scribes began to use hollow note shapes ("white notation"), reserving black shapes only for the smallest note values. This change was probably motivated by the change from parchment to paper for the most common writing material, as paper was less suited to holding large dots of ink.

Also on page 96 starts a discussion on corresponding modern note values, where over time the "absolute value" of a note value grew from short to long.

Early Music Sources has an entertaining and very informative video on the topic of mensural notation that I highly recommend.

It might be worthwhile to note that the "system to break up note values into two or three parts" included the use of a dot to specify that notes that would otherwise have two parts should have three instead, and that this is the source of the modern dot of augmentation. — phoog, Nov 18 '22 at 12:12

Why is the "longest note value still in common use" called a "breve", when breve means "short"?

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