lord-
Their is no difference between a grace note and 32nd note (16th notes isn't a grace note). It's the same duration and it is played the same, it's just easier to write than if you had to write it out with ties or such. i.e. Say you have a half-note then the next note is a grace note to a quarter note. Instead of writing a quarter note tied to a eighth note tied to a dotted sixteenth note, and finally a 32nd note to the quarter note, you would just write what I had stated at the beginning of this example. You can see where it saves alot of trouble.
The same thing goes with the fermenta. Each measure has a correct limit to the duration of a measure. Like you can only have 4 quarter notes in a 4/4 measure. That's the limit of that measure, you can't add anymore notes. This is where a fermenta comes in. Say you had a 4/4 measure and you had 4 quarters and you wanted the last note to play out longer than the other notes. Then you would write a fermenta above the last note. Usually a fermenta is placed at the end of a phrase, and usually only lasts as long as a the note if it was dotted. This is why it looks like a dot with a tie above it. So if you had a fermenta above a quarter note, it would have the duration of a dotted quarter note. Regardless of the limit of beats in a measure. It pretty much saves you from having to extend the time signature to fit the measure or writting a new bar to tie the duration of the note equally.
Hope that makes sense.
[Edited by noticingthemistake on 07-25-2003 at 10:49 AM]
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