Longa (music)

A longa with stem facing down.

A longa rest

A longa is a musical note that could be either twice or three times as long as a breve, four or six times as long as a semibreve/whole note, that appears in early music. It is no longer used in modern music notation because it cannot fit into a measure of any commonly used meter, although the sign for the equivalent rest is sometimes used to mark multi-measure rests.^{[citation needed]}

Rare, but historical, is the duplex longa, called maxima in the 14th century, which is an effective "octuple whole note." As the name suggests, it was always equal to two longæ, never to three, though in the early Ars nova there was a corresponding modus maximarum which could be either imperfect (containing two longæ) or perfect (containing three longæ, or one longa plus one duplex longa) (Apel 1961, 328). In some early sources the duplex longa has the twice the body of a longa, but more often there is no clear difference of shape and the presence of the duplex longa is instead merely suggested by a greater distance between the notes in the tenor (in score notation), caused by the greater number of notes in the upper parts (Apel 1961, 224, 245). See Mensural notation for examples.

References

• Apel, Willi. 1961. The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900–1600, fifth edition, revised and with commentary. The Medieval Academy of America Publication no. 38. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Medieval Academy of America.