In music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

, a double whole note (American or "German" terminology) or breve (British or "classical" terminology) is a note

Note

In music, the term note has two primary meanings:#A sign used in musical notation to represent the relative duration and pitch of a sound;#A pitched sound itself....

 lasting twice as long as a whole note

Whole note

thumb|right|250px|Figure 1. A whole note and a whole rest.In music, a whole note or semibreve is a note represented by a hollow oval note head, like a half note , and no note stem . Its length is equal to four beats in 4/4 time...

 (or semibreve). In medieval mensural notation

Mensural notation

Mensural notation is the musical notation system which was used in European music from the later part of the 13th century until about 1600."Mensural" refers to the ability of this system to notate complex rhythms with great exactness and flexibility...

, the brevis (ancestor of the modern breve) was one of the shortest note lengths (hence its name, which is the Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 cognate

Cognate

In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...

 of "brief") (Read 1969, 14), and could be either a half or a third as long as the longa

Longa (music)

A longa is a musical note that could be either twice or three times as long as a breve, four or six times as long as a semibreve/whole note, that appears in early music...

. However, in modern music notation it is the longest note value still in use (Gehrkens 1914, 106).

In modern notation, a breve is represented in two ways: by a hollow oval note head

Note head

In music, a note head is the elliptical part of a note. Noteheads may be coloured completely black or white, indicating the note value . In a whole note, the note head is the only component of the note. Shorter note values attach a stem to the note head, and possibly beams or flags...

, like a whole note

Whole note

thumb|right|250px|Figure 1. A whole note and a whole rest.In music, a whole note or semibreve is a note represented by a hollow oval note head, like a half note , and no note stem . Its length is equal to four beats in 4/4 time...

, with one or two vertical lines on either side, as on the left of the image, and as the rectangular shape also found in older notation, shown in the middle of the image (Jacob 1960, 21; Read 1969, 459; Gerou and Lusk 1996, 210). An alternative notation consists of a joined pair of whole notes (at the right of the image), but this can easily be confused with a pair of unison whole notes, as found in double-stop notation for stringed instruments or when two parts are written on a single staff.

Because it lasts longer than a bar

Bar (music)

In musical notation, a bar is a segment of time defined by a given number of beats of a given duration. Typically, a piece consists of several bars of the same length, and in modern musical notation the number of beats in each bar is specified at the beginning of the score by the top number of a...

 in most modern time signature

Time signature

The time signature is a notational convention used in Western musical notation to specify how many beats are in each measure and which note value constitutes one beat....

s, the breve is now rarely encountered except in English music, where the half-note is often used as the beat unit (Gherkens 1914, 11). However, in time signatures where the top number is exactly twice that of the bottom, such as 4/2 or 8/4, it lasts a whole bar and so may still be found.

Modern musical notation often employs a breve even when the note value extends beyond the measure. Some write a thicker barline on each side of the note as a means of indicating two joined measures, while some omit this, placing the note in an apparently normal measure.

Breve rest

A related symbol is the double whole rest

Rest (music)

A rest is an interval of silence in a piece of music, marked by a sign indicating the length of the pause. Each rest symbol corresponds with a particular note value:The quarter rest may also be found as a form in older music....

(or breve rest), which usually denotes a silence for the same duration. Double whole rests are drawn as filled-in rectangles occupying the whole vertical space between the second and third lines from the top of the musical staff. They are often used in long silent passages which are not divided into bars to indicate a rest twice as long as a whole rest (or semibreve rest). This and longer rests are collectively known as multiple measure rests.

Alla breve

Alla breve, the time signature 2/2, comes from the note value breve. Originally, in mensural notation, it meant that the brevis was to be considered the unit of time (tactus), instead of the semibrevis, as in other time signatures. This corresponds to its modern use, except that the breves have been replaced by minims (half notes) as the longer note values were discontinued. The sign is similarly a vestige of the one used in mensural notation.