Whole note Whole note In music, a whole note (American) or semibreve (British) is a note represented by a hollow oval note head and no note stem. Its length is equal to four beats in time, that is the whole measure (or bar). Most other notes are fractions of the whole note (e.g., half notes and quarter notes are played for one half and one quarter the duration of the whole note, respectively). The symbol is first found in music notation from the late thirteenth century, and its British name derives from the "semibrevis" of mensural notation. The whole note and whole
Note value duration, as at the end of a piece (e.g. at the end of Mozart's Mass KV 192). A single eighth note, or any faster note, is always stemmed with flags, while two or more are usually beamed in groups. When a stem is present, it can go either up (from the right side of the note head) or down (from the left side), except in the cases of the "longa" or "maxima" which are nearly always written with downward stems. In most cases, the stem goes down if the notehead is on the center line or above, and up otherwise.