Silence is Golden

Perhaps you have heard the saying, "Silence is Golden". This lesson is named after that saying because silence is a very important part of music. You might wonder how that could be possible since many people think of music as a bunch of sounds or noise. Music is actually a combination of sounds and silence.

You will be asked, in this lesson, to notice those times in music where there is silence. Performers know when a composer wants sound by the indication of written notes. You've already learned about those. Now you will learn about rests. A rest tells a performer to continue to count, but don't make a sound for a particular period of time. There are as many different combination of rests in a piece of music as there are combinations of notes. Let's learn a little bit about them.

Rests
For every note, there is a corresponding rest of the same length. For example, the whole note () is a note that gets four beats.

The whole rest also gets four beats: As you can see, it looks like a small black rectangle that hangs from the fourth line. It hangs from that line no matter which clef you use.

The half note () gets two beats, and so does the half rest:

If you look closely, you will notice the half rest and the whole rest look a lot alike. Here's some tips to help you remember which one is which. The half rest looks like a hat. The two words, "hat" and "half" even begin with similar sounds.

The whole rest is just a half rest upside down. Imagine that a whole rest must be "heavier" than a half rest because it is worth four beats instead of two. If you do this, it should be easier to think of the whole rest as hanging from a line because of its "weight". Another way to remember this is a whole rest is it looks like you have dug a "hole" in the ground.

The quarter rest (1 beat):

The eighth rest ( beat):

The sixteenth rest ( beat):

Take a look at the following table. It shows the relationship between the notes and rests:

NUMBER OF BEATS	NOTE	REST
4
2
1

There are two other musical symbols you will learn in this lesson that can change the way a note is "held". They are the "tie" and the "slur". Both of these symbols are represented by a curved line that connects two notes.

Definitions....

A tie is a curved line that joins two notes of the same pitch together so that they are played as one longer note.

A slur is a curved line that joins two notes of different pitches together so that they are played or sung smoothly, one after the other.

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