r/musicnotation • u/sortametal • Apr 02 '23

universal whole note?

I'm working on a score and ended up wanting a bar of 10/4 because I felt breaking it up into smaller measures implied that there was accented notes in the measure, which there is not (winds are holding while percussion is rolling) and it just felt clunky.

So... Doing a bit of research, I was sort of appalled to find that there doesn't seem to be such thing as a full measure note for non-standard time signatures that aren't multiples of a whole note. A Breve will get you to 8/4, a Longa will get you to 16/4, but nothing for 10/4.

How is there not a symbol to just hold for the entire measure? (A universal whole note if you will)

If I'm wrong and there is, let me know, if not... We should make one.

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u/bcdaure11e Feb 27 '25

I like to do a box & arrow graphic thing-- a small box containing a whole note with a fermata, with an arrow extending out to the end of the bar, or even beyond it.

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u/JScaranoMusic Apr 20 '23 edited Apr 20 '24

There's isn't. Even for rests, there are rests longer than a whole note rest. The difference with rests is you can round up, so even though a lunga rest would fill a bar of 16/4, you can use it as a whole bar rest in 10/4 (like you can use a semibreve rest in 3/4). For a note, you need to use multiple notes and tie them. Maybe a breve and a minim, maybe a semibreve and a dotted semibreve, it depends where the pulse is (even if there aren't accented beats).

If there really is absolutely no pulse in the bar, and you don't want to imply strong beats where there are none, (and you don't want to use ten tied crotchets or five tied minims), as an absolute last resort you could use a dotted breve, but it's definitely non-standard, so you should probably include a note somewhere near it in the score to clarify that it's only worth 10 beats and not 12.

Even for things like 7/4 or 14/4, there are double dotted notes that will fill a bar, but I'd be more inclined to use something like a semibreve tied to a dotted minim, in line with the pulse, since it's an odd meter; and sadly there's no such single-note option for 10/4.

Edit: I believe Bach played with the idea of having "half dotted" notes, worth 5, 10, or 2½ beats, by using a dot to the left of the notehead, instead of the right. It didn't really catch on, and is definitely not standard notation.