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)

Great stave

User:84.51.162.26 just changed [1] the following

grand staff (British - great stave)

to internationalisation

great stave(Brit) or grand staff (Am)

labelling it "internationalisation". This does not reflect my understanding of the MOS on international English. This article is written in American English, and British terms should be in parentheses. It's impossible to write articles trying to give equal weight to different terms. Comments? —Wahoofive (talk) 00:16, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think that was the right thing to do. The appropriate guideline is Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English. Neither dialect is dominant enough in music to justify giving more weight to one term or the other when presenting them initially. The only reason for choosing either AmE or BrE for articles like this is the first editor's preference, which in this case is American English. Hairy Dude 13:26, 17 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I just looked up staff and stave in Grove on-line. Grove is a British work--at least the first and second editions were British works. The Stave entry says merely, "See Staff. The Staff entry uses staff repeatedly as the singular form and staves repeatedly as the plural form and does not mention stave at all (nor, for that matter, does it mention staffs). In the first place, I don't see why wikipedia music articles should not follow Grove's example--in this respect and most others. In the second place, although it does appear ancedotally that stave is more common in England than it is in the United States, I'm not yet convinced that England is monolithic in this regard. TheScotch 06:28, 26 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]