Talk:Staff (music)

Note that terms suck as quaver and breve aren't use in the united states. They shouldn't be necessary for Musical staff information. --Sketchee 06:08, Nov 26, 2004 (UTC)

---

This was on the Musical staff page itself. I removed and put it here

---

This is a STUB. More words could be moved here from Musical notation

This article is roughly merged from two other pages. Will work on it later -- Tarquin

---

By the way, it looks like this page need edition, as nobody made it better yet. Any volunteer? Yves

Done. Stuff I've removed is below -- Tarquin 11:00 Sep 10, 2002 (UTC)

used for musical notation. A note is symbolised by a round symbol, which may be on a line between two lines or touching an outer line. A 5-line staff so provides places for 11 notes. The notes are spaced according to a diatonic scale, whose key is specified by the key signature.

The musical staff is a set of five parallel horizontal lines and the four spaces between them. Lines and spaces are assigned notes by means of a clef, which is placed at the beginning of the staff. Ledger lines are used to write notes above or below the range of the staff. The musical staff can be thought of as a graph of pitch with respect to time; pitches are roughly given by their vertical position on the staff, and notes on the left are played before notes to their right.

What? Hyacinth 19:18, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

"Stave" is probably an incorrect backformation of the plural, like saying "loave", "leave", "beeve", etc.

Staves were not always fixed at five lines -- in particular five is not the most that was used, nor were all staves in one publication the same. eg Girolamo Frescobaldi's Toccate d'Intavolutura had grand staves of six lines over eight, a mindbending thing to try to play from. Kwantus 23:56, 2005 May 8 (UTC)