Quarter rest

What it means

The quarter rest designates a silence of the duration of a quarter note. In most time signatures it thereby corresponds exactly to one beat, which makes it the most easily grasped of all rests: one beat's worth of nothing.

In the series of rests it stands between the half and eighth rests. Dotted, it yields three eighths, but in practice such values are mostly resolved into several rests, so that the beats remain visible in the notation.

In the notation

The sign of the quarter rest has a shape of its own, jagged, and stands vertically in the middle of the staff. It resembles no other rest sign and is therefore easy to recognize — unlike the whole and half rests, which are easily confused. In older prints a mirror-reversed form occasionally appears.

In multi-voice systems the rest is shifted upward or downward, so that the voices can be told apart.

Musical use

Quarter rests structure phrases and motives at the level of the beat. They stand between short motives, before entries, and in accompanying voices that drop out on light beats. A frequent textural pattern is the rest on the one, after which the music enters only on the second beat — this produces a palpable forward pull, because the expected heavy beat stays empty. In vocal music the quarter rest serves for breath between sections of text.

Its sign is a curved, vertical line. It resembles a bolt of lightning or a winding stroke. Dotted it lasts a quarter and an eighth. In English it is called the quarter rest.

Performance practice

Count the rest along as a full beat; it is more often taken too short than too long. Make sure that the preceding note ends cleanly, especially with keyboard instruments using the pedal and with string players, where the sound lingers. Prepare the entry after the rest during its duration, not only afterward. And treat rests on an accented beat deliberately: their effect arises only if there is really silence.