Does anyone agree with me that the system of calling notes quavers, crotchets etc is simply traditional but irrelevant. It would be better, esp for people learning from scratch, to use the American system, of whole notes, half notes etc because this actually means something and helps understanding.

If anyone doesn't know:

Whole note = semi-breve
Half note = mimim, ie half a whole note
Quarter note = crotchet, ie quarter of a whole note
Eighth note, sixteenth note etc

They also talk about dotted half notes etc.

It's so sensible, I just can't believe it's not used here.

Richiscoul

hi im janets daughter.
not sure if i agree with you about the American system- for starters although breves are not used often they are a proper whole note, not a semi-breve. However i am very cynical about everything becoming Americanised whatever it is! I think some things change for the better but some things are part of British life and always have been and i don't think it should change.
It might just be me, but if anyone calls notes by their American names, despite knowing what the note is it still takes me a while to work out what note it is.

find the American system confusing coz i think of crotchets as a whole note quavers as a half etc. So I don't like it when people use it i get reallt confused!!

Hello janet's daughter

I understand what you are saying and I agree Americanisation for its own sake is not a good idea. I just feel that for starting out students it is a better system because the names relate to something. I don't know if I agree with you about breves - I looked through virtually every music book I have and didn't find one!!!! The Collins music dictionary describes it as 'only occasionally used'. BTW, the Americans call it a double whole note, which still makes sense!!!

Richiscoul

I have to disagree with moving to the American system. We have specialised names for the notes that's what they're called so why not use them? Should we abolish the word hexagon and call it a six-sided shape? Or the word chair and call it 'a thing with four legs and a back rest'? (I appreciate that this doesn't cover all possible types of chair...). There's too much dumbing down going on...

I think that Jannet's daughter (sorry I don't know your name!) makes a good point what is a 'whole' note and why should it be a semi-breve (ironically something with half in the English name!)? Surely it should be a breve; but then some people feel more comfortable with it being a crotchet and breves are rarely used meaning that using them as a reference would be giving people an unfarmiliar note to reference from; so there's no defined reference point: should the definition change depending on the time signature of the piece: a whole note is a note that lasts the whole bar ?

Why change the perfectly valid names we've had for so long? Surely they're not that difficult to cope with.

im used to the traditional note names now

Its probably down to what you were first taught to some extent.
Though when I ask my pupils which they prefer they always go for 'crotchet, minim, quaver'. 'American' time names sound too much like maths

I think you are missing the point. I am not advocating dumbing down - help with understanding is not dumbing down. I think the thing I detect, and what I suspected would happen, is the idea that because it is American, it is dumb, lazy, bad.

I also think that because the people on this forum are comfortable with crotchets etc it doen't mean that someone starting in music would not benefit from the note names having some reference to their function. A an aside, hexagon demonstrates my point in a way. A hexagon is so-called becasue hex is the Greek prefix meaning six!!! A whole note is so called because it is the longest single note (without dots) in normal use.

I don't mind arguing the point about the subject, but I don't like the boring anti-American tone. The problem is, there becomes a mindset that everything American is bad, even if it's good.

Maybe to avoid any accusations of dumbing down, we could make the grossly simple system of naming notes (A-G) more difficult by making them every third letter of the alphabet and then reversing the order!!!!!!
richiscoul

I like the names of the notes just the way thy are, I'm not a fan of americanisation.

I do understand that hexagon is from the greek meaning six: indeed that was why I thought it was a good example; surely we should use the English word six rather than the Greek word: that way everyone would know instantly what it was without having to know two things that mean six... Another point related to this:

Breve is a brieve (an assigned name);
Semi-breve (semi meaning half is a half breve);
Crotchet and Quaver have their own names perhaps due to common usage: for convenience;
Semi-quaver (half quaver);
demi-semi quaver (half of half a quaver...);

so it is logical, in some way, in that sense anyway.

My post was anti-American (my complaint with Americanisms would be the overuse of z ), just anti-dumbing-down: I don't think that it's that difficult to remember four names for things; just because they're notes: think of hours, minutes and seconds: should we rename them to full hours, sixtieth hours and three-thousand-six-hundreth hours so that people can understand time? We don't do this because everybody learns about time and knows what they are; so everyone who learns about music can learn what the notes are called is it more difficult to learn the words brieve, crotchet and quaver than hours minutes and seconds?

I'm struggling to get the point over!!!! It seems some people reject the idea JUST BECAUSE IT IS AMERICAN but are not considering whether it's a good idea or not!!! Now that's daft to me. America is hardly backwards in the world of musical education or professional music.

I like the notes how they are... I think of the crotchets as whole notes sometimes and semibreves as whole notes at other times and it would be confusing to me to have the notes as 'whole note' etc. also I think that we should keep music as traditional as possible and crotchet, semi quaver etc. sound much more sophisticated and clever then whole note and half note IMHO.

xx L xx

I hesitated to intervene but I agree with Richiscoul; the "american" note names are more practical or as they say in marketing psychographic. When one hears of a WHOLE note there is a "vision" of something full, whole, complete; the HALF note would be the opposite, and so on. I started music using the "british" name system and when I took up the "american" was happy because it made a lot more sense, although I am able to use both. I must admit that I prefer the "american." Sometimes attitude determines behavior and it seems to follow some responses to this issue. I agree that i am not a fan of the Americanization policy, its arrogant, chauvinistic and prejudiced; but logically if a system works and makes sense, no matter where it comes from, I think the intelligent thing to do is to adopt it where practical. In this regard Britain should not worry, I don't think the note names will change anytime soon. Incidentally I live in the US.

i agree with anotherpianist who i think touched on the fact that the problem with the american system is that it only works in 4/4, which for a beginner would probably offset the difficulty (if there is any!) of learning to say crotchet by adding the difficulty that in say 3/4, a "quarter note" is really a "third note" and in 6/8 would be heaven knows what... a "two thirds of a half note"?

stephen

So, I just kind of stumbled across this while looking for something on Google and found this discussion interesting. Being an American, I've obviously used the system of whole notes and whatnot. This system works in 4/4 and any other time signature, but is more math based as was mentioned above.
Using steve's examples, a quarter note works in 3/4 (not really mathmatically) in that the time signature is over 4, making the "quarter" make sense. In 6/8, you use Eighth notes as one beat/count in a measure, thus justifying the 8 in 6/8.

Er... I hope I explained that in a way that made sense.

I like the quaver/crotchet way. It's just that I'm more used to it. Also (this is rather beside the point, but), 'half-notes' 'quarter-notes' and such sound really bland, uninteresting and number-oriented - whereas (IMO) breves, crotchets and quavers sound much nicer. As someone said with the time example, they're just names of things, and not everything has to reflect on their mathematical nature.

And please note, I'm not saying this because I am anti-American. In Japan, they use a similar style to the Americans - crotechets are quarter-notes (in Japanese), minims half-notes, etc. I learnt it like that when I lived in Japan, but I much prefer the British system. So I'm not being that biased, having tried out both systems.

I agree with purple pianist; I think of crotchets being 1, quavers being a half etc. Its easier that way when you're calculating where bar lines go etc.

Yes, I agree with you. In the initial stages of learning notation, it must be easier to remember the time values of notes under their 'American' names, which directly tell you the value of the note as a fraction of a bar in 'Common' time. It must also make it easier to understand time signatures, as you do not need to convert the lower digit into another word to understand it, e.g. 3-8 time means exactly that - three eighth-notes to a bar.

However, being in the UK, I feel it necessary to be familiar with both conventions, so I make my pupils aware of both.

PS:
If you think that is confusing, ever had to deal with Italian note (pitch) names? B = 'si' (sounds like C); C = 'do'; D = 're' etc... therefore 'si majjore' = B major, not C major. Now that's confusing!

Well, that's only confusing if you speak English. When I first learnt the existence of music, I got tauhght in do-re-mi-fa-so-rah-si-do, like the Italians. It doesn't confuse me at all...

I go to an American school, so all of the music classes we take at school (and I have taken all of my life) have used the American note-naming system. My piano teacher is Sri Lankan, and they used the traditional system there, so we use the traditional system in piano class. I like both methods, though I find that when teaching to small children, they prefer the American method.

Rah?????

I don't know, maybe it's la. It didn't make much difference to me when I learnt it, because I learnt it in Japanese and there's no difference in pronounciation between r and l.

In theory using 'whole note, half note, quarter note' should make it easy to see the relationship between note values. But Most children ( and adults) I know have a phobia against anything which sounds like maths.
How may 7 year olds REALLY understand the mathematical relationships between these valuse anyway?

Mostly I suppose people tend to be happiest with what they were brought up with.

How about the french equivalents?

noir (i.e.black note) = crotchet

blanche (i.e. white note) = minim

croche (i.e. note with a hook on it!!) = quaver


Any Germanists care to tell us the German system?
(I love the idea of H being a B natural!!)

Petite Joueuse, the French system sounds fun!

I like the German H as well. I was reading about how J.S. Bach used the letters of his last name to compose melodies: Bb, A, C, and B. My brother's name is Ahad, so I stole Bach's idea and started composing a melody with A B A D. It was fun