In music, a half note (American) or minim is a note played for one half the duration of a whole note, hence the name.
Figure 1. A half note with stem facing up, a half note with stem facing down, and a half rest.
Half notes are notated with a hollow oval note head (like a whole note) and a straight note stem with no flags (like a quarter note; see Figure 1). A similar symbol is the half rest (or minim rest), which denotes a silence for the same duration. Half rests are drawn as filled-in rectangles sitting on top of the middle line of the musical staff. As with all notes with stems, half notes are drawn with stems to the right of the notehead, facing up, when they are below the middle line of the staff. When they are on or above the middle line, they are drawn with stems on the left of the note head, facing down.
Minimalism (music), an influential style of musical composition during the last half of the 20th century.
The major practitioners of minimalmusic are American composers Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley.
Young wrote music with few pitches and with notes sustained for extended periods; his Trio in C (1958) is often cited as one of the first minimalist works.
Minimalmusic (for the time being we shall continue to use the term as fearlessly as possible) has been variously described as "trance music" (5), "systems music" (6), "process music", "solid state music" (7), "repetitive music" and "structuralist music" (8).
Both "systems music" and "process music" are generally quite useful as descriptions; we propose to differentiate between the two, preferring the "process" term as being more applicable to the early works of the genre, where the compositions are structurally nothing more than single processes.
This features prominently in the music of Reich written in the 1970s ("Six Pianos", "Music for 18 Musicians", "Octet") and is usually achieved by dropping the lower voices of the texture to have them return with new material underneath the upper voices of the old texture, as shown in Example 12.
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