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A silence of a stated length.
A rest is notated silence, and it shapes music as much as the notes do: it gives singers and wind players breath, lets textures clear, and separates gestures. Write every rest needed to fill the bar in each part, and group rests so the beat stays clear. A rest under a fermata, or a general pause, stops the whole texture.
Rest is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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