The Quarter Rest - Piano Notes

Today I will show you how to read piano notes with musical rests. Let's first review what we've learned so far.

Music Rests in General

Welcome back!

When we discussed rhythm we divided the beats into groups. Each group ended with a barline. So in a time signature of 4/4 we had a bar line after every four beats.
Within those groups we could play tones with different lengths. We could measure the length of those tones through counting the number of the beats which takes until the tone is through.

"Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music. ~Marcel Marceau".

Now, If would always produce a sound we would get tired after a while from the amount of information we produce and we're going to exhaust our listeners as well with loads of musical information.
further more it will be rather crowded and boring to always make sound.
Leopold Stokowski actually said that "a painter paints pictures on canvas, but musicians paint their pictures on silence."
What I like about this saying is that you play the silence. You understand that it provides a beautiful contrast to the sound.

Basically, having breaks in music provides the melody some validity. Or in other words, the musical rests in music allow a musical piece to breathe.

So What's the meaning of rests?

A rest is a sign of silence.

In the coming few lessons I will show you three different rests with three different lengths.
When you see a rest you have to reconize how long it is and then to skip those number of beats. This will become more clear to you as you procceed reading.

The Quarter Rest

Let's start! I'll first show you how to read recognize rests of one quarter note. The sign looks like this:
A Quarter Rest

You can hear how I play this rest in a musical pattern in the next example .
rhythm pattern with a quarter rest.

The second beat and the fourth one should remain silent in the second bar in this example.
Or maybe better say should be played silently.

And here's a musical piece where the quarter rest plays an important roll, the fifth symphony by Beethoven.
Try to play it and don't forget to count 1.. 2.. 3.. 4..

A Quarter Rest in the fifth symphony by Beethoven

In the next two musical pieces you'll have to read and play the quarter rest. Give it a try!

Click here if you haven't signed to Piano Playground, our free E-zine yet. Make sure you do that in order to get the username and password codes for the Quarter REst Piano Sheet Music I provide here under.

The Little Bird	Download	Play
Jump Around	Download	Play

Terrific! let's continue...

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