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A typical five-line staff. In Western musical notation, the staff [1] [2] (UK also stave; [3] plural: staffs or staves), [1] also occasionally referred to as a pentagram, [4] [5] [6] is a set of five horizontal lines and four spaces that each represent a different musical pitch or in the case of a percussion staff, different percussion instruments.
On a 5-line staff: Neutral clef Used for pitchless instruments, such as percussion instruments. Not a true clef—the lines and spaces do not indicate pitches—but it occupies the position of a clef. In this case, the lines and spaces indicate specific instruments, such as the different individual instruments in a drum set. It may also be ...
The staff (or stave, in British English) consists of 5 parallel horizontal lines which acts as a framework upon which pitches are indicated by placing oval note-heads on (ie crossing) the staff lines, between the lines (ie in the spaces) or above and below the staff using small additional lines called ledger lines. Notation is read from left to ...
The word neume entered the English language in the Middle English forms newme, nevme, neme in the 15th century, from the Middle French neume, in turn from either medieval Latin pneuma or neuma, the former either from ancient Greek πνεῦμα pneuma ('breath') or νεῦμα neuma ("sign"), [4] [5] or else directly from Greek as a corruption or an adaptation of the former.
It occasionally appears in keyboard music (for example, in Brahms's Organ Chorales and John Cage's Dream for piano). It was originally used for alto parts in choral music to reduce the number of ledger lines needed, since much of the alto range is between treble and bass clef. Alto parts are now commonly written in treble clef instead. [5]
Later, staff lines were printed, but scribes still added in the rest of the music by hand. The greatest difficulty in using movable type to print music is that all the elements must line up – the note head must be properly aligned with the staff. In vocal music, text must be aligned with the proper notes (although at this time, even in ...
Types of bar lines. In musical notation, a bar (or measure) is a segment of music bounded by vertical lines, known as bar lines (or barlines), usually indicating one or more recurring beats. The length of the bar, measured by the number of note values it contains, is normally indicated by the time signature.
A rest is the absence of a sound for a defined period of time in music, or one of the musical notation signs used to indicate that. The length of a rest corresponds with that of a particular note value, thus indicating how long the silence should last. Each type of rest is named for the note value it corresponds with (e.g. quarter note and ...