It’s the Minnesota State Arts Board logo, on the right in this image:
MY friends and I are stumped.
The third line appears to represent a brush stroke.
The fourth line, with the slashes, dashes, and curves, is a form of scansion for poetry.
The five horizontal lines at the bottom look like a musical staff.
My guess is that the second line (the squiggly one) represents writing.
The first may be a form of choreography notation.
I thought of scansion symbols as well, but what form? I’ve never seen that hyphen looking symbol. It’s typical “x” and a slash, or the curve and a tick.
A bastardized form. It seems like they didn’t want to be spot on with any of the symbols.
Ugh, people with odd logos should have a page that explains what they mean. I couldn’t find anything, but this site did a survey of every state’s arts board logo and this was the result for Minnesota http://thechart.me/arts-agency-report-card-results/
“They get some points for creativity but ???”
“Probably means a lot to those in the ‘know,’ but does not translate and may be off putting to the general public.”
“Though the color scheme is dated, I love the visual representation of different art forms in this logo. It’s inspiring in a way others aren’t—directly illustrating various mediums.”
“Extra points for making music the centerpiece here, and for using musical notation as the visual. It strongly states creativity through the notation. It gives a lot of real estate to the image, which might be just right.”
“It makes me feel like I don’t know enough to understand this logo.”
Yeah, a dotted whole rest doesn’t actually make any sense… you can only rest for the entire measure once; saying once-and-a-half is no bueno.
The first one looks like crop circle writing; maybe it says “No services this exit,” like all the others.
Moving from left to right, the first orangish/yellow is to celebrate the estuaries and marsh lands and the life that is there.
The second one, red, celebrates the arts. The music clef and the calligraphy pen are obvious.
The third in blue is a representation of a fish, in water. To show commitment to ecological concerns of the ocean.
The fourth, green one represents the same ideals, but on the land/forest.
Thanks, Dallas, but I was asking about the symbols in the logo on the right.
I did find something that seemed to have some resemblance to the first set of symbols in (as Gus Gusterson suggested) in choreography notation. As others have observed, none of the symbol sets seem accurate, suggesting that they were trying maybe for abstractions of the “essence” of the symbols, I guess?
Oh, I see.
The top of the images on the right shows a hockey player being chased by the police for skating on a frozen public highway.
The next one down is to remember the “Barbed Wire” wars.
The third one is that damn sea green stripe that was found on everything from clothes to Dixie cups in the '80s. Some places have still not ran out of those cups.
The 4th symbol is the digital recipe for scrapple. A fried meat loaf of scraps that your dog hates you for keeping from him.
The final image on the bottom is five purple lines.
Maybe it’s in n/4 time, where n >= 6.
Dotted whole notes and whole note rests are absolutely fine. As yabob says, not all music is four whole notes to the bar. 6/4 in particular is not that unusual a time signature. That said, looking up songs in 6/4 (like Chopin’s Nocturne Op 9 No 1 in Bb minor), the six-beat rests are just notated there as normal whole note rests. Same with the rests in Holst’s “Uranus” from The Planets. I had actually never noticed that before, but for time signatures longer than four, it seems the dotted whole note rest is an entire measure rest. So perhaps we have to look into time signatures like 7/4 and beyond to see it being used as a dotted semibreve rest. I’m actually intrigued now. I thought for sure the rests in the Chopin piece, which I know, were dotted whole note rests, but they’re not. I know I’ve seen dotted whole notes, and even have recollection of double dotted whole notes, but I didn’t realize that it can be different with rests.
ETA: Actually, there’s probably dotted whole note rests in some 3/2 pieces of music. Lemme look.
ETA2: Actually, I’m a moron. 3/2 would also have the whole note rest representing 6 quarter notes, since that’s an entire measure rest. It would need to be something like 4/2 or 5/2 and above, which I’m struggling to think of.
Actually, if one can find a piece notated in 12/4, I’d bet you can find a dotted whole note rest there. 12/8 is pretty common, but I’m having more difficulty than I thought I would finding 12/4. And, since there is no way anymore to force google to search for the exact string “12/4 time” like you used to be able to in ye olde yonder days, it tries to be “helpful” by fuzzy searching other terms it thinks you might have meant, even though you used quote marks and a plus sign to indicate “must contain this exact string.”
So, if you have a time signature like 6/4, if a whole-note rest means “the whole measure”, then how do you indicate a four-beat rest (i.e., a rest the same length as a whole note)?
A dotted half rest followed by a quarter rest, usually. And using a dotted whole rest to indicate an empty measure is kind of ridiculous; that logo was probably designed by someone who didn’t know any better or just thought it looked cool, like the birthday cake I received when I was 10 that had an upside down and backwards eighth note.
Just like you don’t read one word at a time when you read a book, your eye sees an empty measure and immediately knows what the whole rest means. To add the dot is just cluttering the page and (in modern music, anyway) has pretty much fallen out of fashion.
You generally wouldn’t want to indicate it as a whole note rest, anyway, as it goes across the middle of the measure, and there’s conventions that dissuade you from breaking up the beat like that, since it makes the measure subdivisions a bit difficult to parse. In this PDF score of the Chopin Nocturne I referenced above, there are no 4 beat rests, but there is a five-beat one at the third from last bar, and that is notated as quarter note rest, quarter note rest, half note rest, quarter note rest. The intro has silence in the left hand for the duration of a dotted half note, but the rests are marked as half note, quarter note. I suspect this publisher, in the context of this song, would notate a four beat rest as half note rest, quarter note rest, quarter note rest if it occurred at beat 1 of the bar, and quarter note rest, quarter note rest, half note rest, if it occurred on beat 2 of the bar, and quarter note rest, half note rest, quarter note rest, if it occurred on beat three of the bar.
So, to answer the OP’s question, and what I saw when i first looked at it, is that each line represents a different one of the Arts, but does it in as generic a manner as possible. The first line is choreography, the next is writing, then painting, then poetry, and finally music. They are made to not be specific to any piece, and so they show support for all of the Arts. Personally, I don’t think it should be that cryptic.
#2 is writing?
Wow! That handwriting is worse than mine! That’s hard to do since I write illegibly in 4 different languages! :dubious:
I was wondering if maybe that was ‘conductor mark-up’ showing how the orchestra or band’s leader should be waving his hand(s) during the performance.
Just a WAG
—G!