Rest (music)
interval of silence in a piece of music, marked by a rest symbol indicating the length of the pause
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 quarter rest, or quaver and quaver rest), and each of them has a distinctive sign.
Description
Rests are intervals of silence in pieces of music, marked by symbols indicating the length of the silence. Each rest symbol and name corresponds with a particular note value, indicating how long the silence should last, generally as a multiplier of a measure or whole note.
The quarter (crotchet) rest (𝄽) may take a different form in older music.
The four-measure rest or longa rest are only used in long silent passages which are not divided into bars.
The combination of rests used to mark a silence follows the same rules as for note values.
One-bar rest
When an entire bar is devoid of notes, a whole (semibreve) rest placed at the middle of the measure is used, regardless of the actual time signature.
“Rest (music)” enters the record as interval of silence in a piece of music, marked by a rest symbol indicating the length of the pause. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rest, music and interval can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q879844. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rest (music)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.