A rest is a musical notationsign that indicates the absence of a sound. Each rest symbol and name corresponds with a particular note value for length, indicating how long the silence should last.
Description
Rests are intervals of silence in pieces of music, marked by symbols indicating the length of the pause. 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 rest may also be found as a 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 pause follows the same rules as for note values.
One-bar rests
When an entire bar is devoid of notes, a whole rest is used, regardless of the actual time signature. The only exceptions are for a time signature, when a double whole rest is typically used for a bar's rest, and for time signatures shorter than, when a rest of the actual measure length would be used. For a bar rest, it is also common to use the whole rest instead of the double whole rest, so that a whole-bar rest for all time signatures starting from is notated using a whole note rest. Some published music places the numeral "" above the rest to confirm the extent of the rest. Occasionally in manuscript autographs and facsimiles, bars without notes are sometimes left completely empty, possibly even without the staves.
Multiple measure rests
In instrumental parts, rests of more than one bar in the same meter and key may be indicated with a multimeasure rest, showing the number of bars of rest, as shown. Multimeasure rests of are usually drawn in one of two ways:
As long, thick horizontal lines placed on the middleline of the staff, with serifs at both ends or as thick diagonal lines placed between the second and fourth lines of the staff, regardless of how many bars' rests it represents;
The former system of notating multirests draws multirests according to the picture above right until a certain amount of bar rests is reached when multirests are then drawn to the first method. How long exactly must a multirest be until the above method is used is largely a matter of personal taste, most publishers use ten as the changing point, however bigger and smaller changing points are used, especially in earlier music.
The number of whole-rest lengths for which the multimeasure rest lasts is indicated by a number printed above the musical staff. If a meter or key change occurs during a multimeasure rest, the rest must be broken up as required for clarity, with the change of key and/or meter indicated between the rests. This also applies in the case of double barlines, which demarcate musical phrases or sections.
Dotted rests
A rest may also have a dot after it, increasing its duration by half, but this is less commonly used than with notes, except occasionally in modern music notated in compound meters such as or. In these meters the long-standing convention has been to indicate one beat of rest as a quarter rest followed by an eighth rest. See: Anacrusis.
