Some of the posts in the thread on alternative music notation got me thinking about clefs. Most musicians need to learn to deal with different clefs: pianists must learn two, cellists three and conductors at least four. If you study Solfège in France, you will end up learning no less than seven clefs. Many people find all these different clefs tiresome and it's certainly reasonable to ask: do we really need them all?
There's a lot to discuss here. I'm going to start with a personal anecdote:
How I made friends with the bass clef
I started learning to play the piano by ear, at around the age of four. I found learning to read music very tiring, and a few years later I had a reasonable grasp of the treble clef, but it still took me ages to decipher the notes in the bass clef.
Then at the age of eight, I started cello lessons. My teacher explained to me how the four strings are tuned: you start with the top one, A, then go down in fifths to D, G and C (oh the wonderful sound of those fifths!). She got me plucking the strings and showed me where to put the fingers of the left hand on the strings to produce some simple tunes. She asked me how good I was with the bass clef, and I looked at her sheepishly and said something like "not very good". That didn't discourage her. She told me:
"We cellists are so lucky to have the bass clef"
What did she mean? She took a piece of manuscript paper, drew a bass clef on the staff and pencilled in the notes of the four strings:
Then she drew 4 lines through those notes:
This was a revelation. There were the four strings of my celIo, visible on the staff! I realised that I didn't have to go through those tedious steps of remembering which mnemonic I needed to use, then getting the letter name from this, then remembering where to find the note with that name on the instrument. I could see the direct connection between the line of the staff and the corresponding string of my cello.
This started a revolution in the way I read music, and considerably sped up the learning process. I found I could apply the same principle to the piano. I could easily see which notes on the piano keyboard corresponded to the strings of the cello, and thus connect them with the lines of the bass clef. These notes became landmarks for me.
Thus I made friends with the bass clef.
In the discussion about alternative music notation, WieWaldi asked the question : which clef is the best one? Maybe we only need the bass clef? To be continued...
