Clefs: how many do we really need?

BartK All these notational reforms seem to be either invented by beginners or aimed at beginners for a perceived convenience or simplicity, whereas the notational system that is currently in widespread use was invented by and for the convenience of professional musicians.

Many great and good inventions have been made by beginners. The beginners, that were learning the existing system and figured out some flaws. The people you describe as "professional musicians" simply didn't see the shortcomings. Or they got used to the existing one, and they don't see a need to change it. And sure, why should they change something they have become a master of?
I think it was Mark Twain who said something like this: "If one does something always the same way and never thought about changing it, it is likely he did it in a bad way, all the time."

BartK The first problem with a double-G clef or double-F clef notation is the range. The bass C on the image above is the C that normally sits on the second space from the bottom of the staff. That means you need a lot more legder lines than normally used to reach the lower notes.

True, BUT you would get rid of one ledger line on top of the upper staff. And if I overfly my sheet music, I see a lot more ledger lines on top of the treble clef compared to the bottom of it. Result: a big win in terms of range for double F-clef. Hands down.

BartK The double-F clef would be even worse for range because to reach the top note you would need to use both a 15 on the clef and a 15ma notation above the staff, and you would still need ledger lines.

Please, Bart, don't play the "pretend to be stupid"-game. Or course there needs to be a different clef symbol that indicates the octave range. Someone can invent new fancy symbols or just go with the approach of Referend Thomas Salmon from 1672, to use "Tr", "M" and "B" as clef symbols.

BartK Speaking of intervallic relationships, the second problem I see with this is around the middle. The ledger lines in between the staves preserve all the intervallic relationships between the hands because middle C is the same line above and below. If you have notes going up several ledger lines from the bass staff you know how they relate to the notes in the right hand, and vice versa. This is not so clear when the top note is F and the spaces and lines are inverted when going further up.

Come on, we both know this would be the same with two F-clefs. Except it isn't the middle C in the very center, but the middle D instead.

BartK As a beginner you might not encounter music that has these issues and it might seem simpler at first but that kind of puts a limit on your development.

And again, the "you are a beginner"-card. I might be a beginner, still I understand enough to defend my points with ease.

BartK As a more advanced pianist I can assure you that the way I think about the music when I look at notation is very different than what it used to be as a beginner.

You can assure me. But you failed every time when you tried to point it out.

BartK Most of the time I don't really care about what the actual notes are (although I learned to recognise all the note and it didn't really take very long and I don't get all the fuss about having to learn it)...

Then you wouldn't care as well, if you learned it differently?

BartK ...but I care a lot about intervals and shapes of chords.

Good point. But this would not change. You can recognize the intervals and shapes of chords as you can today.

BartK If I see a big chord that has a top note something like 5 ledger lines above the staff I don't even count those lines because normally I see chord shapes.

Whoa - one ledger line less. Would this really be a problem for you? Do you really think it gets harder because of that?

MRC f you want to give it a try, here's what the beginning of the last movement of Beethoven's op. 2 N° 3 looks like if the treble clefs are replaced with the French violin clef:

I'm in a good position for this because of my weird background. I only learned to associate lines and spaces with piano keys a few years ago and I turn 71 this month. Totally untaught, my way of reading music was a bit like the first attempts at notation with neumes dancing around a single line, with note patterns reflecting common shapes of music. I "found Do" and drew an imaginary line on that line or space, and all the notes were above or below that spot.

Therefore it was relatively easy, when I studied theory, to work with variously positioned C clefs, historical positions of the G or F clefs like yours here. I simply reverted back to the imaginary line and an intervallic feel.

There were major weaknesses in the manner that I "read" music, and I retrained largely using the ideas of a teacher who had a perspective on reading piano music which made sense to me. I built an association where "this line" automatically makes me hand want to go to "this piano key", and note names attach to this dual experience afterward. It goes with teaching principles I got in teacher training: the abstract follows the physical. (sharps and flats become directions to go higher or lower, right or left - I adopted this when I found it worked better than learning what G# and Ab "were").

If for strong piano readers, this association (among other things) of line or space to piano key is automatic - then switching to the clef being on a different line can really mess them up. While I can read such notation, I don't like to go there because my new strengths are relatively fragile. I still manage not to see what line something is on, or how many leger lines are involved, because for decades I mentally erased all but the single "here's the Tonic" line. That's fine for predictable diatonic music, but not the kind of music that I now play, among many kinds.

It would indeed have been nice of the French violin clef had become the standard.

Or the D idea (strings players would be deleted) - but the Western world is very C-major-centric. (more history)

WieWaldi
I'm replying in good faith. No need for the sarcasm.

When I wrote my post I was replying to Animisha and I didn't see your post yet so I assumed two bass clefs one octave apart. If they are two octaves apart then indeed you end up with preserved intervals. That's an advantage, granted, but a really small one if you look at all the other things you have to learn to read music.

Anyway, if you want to propose a new system then it has to be significantly better for the majority of musicians, not just for learners. You might complain about that but that's just how things work. People don't adopt a new system unless there are clear advantages for them. Most musicians would just go "meh! whatever!" because the change of clef has a really tiny advantage and a huge disadvantage that you need to change all existing music and teach the new system to everyone. It's not worth the effort unless the advantage is overwhelmingly significant.

macuaig Forgive a novice, but why do the staffs on a score need to connect at all? Instead of renaming all the lines and spaces, couldn’t it just be two separate tonal locations with the same map?

That's fine if you have two instruments that play their own part in a limited range but that's not generally how most piano repertoire is written. The hands move smoothly between low and high on the keyboard, sometimes even crossing, and it's useful to see all the interval relationships between the low and high part of the staff as one continuum.

BartK WieWaldi
I'm replying in good faith. No need for the sarcasm.

When I wrote my post I was replying to Animisha and I didn't see your post yet so I assumed two bass clefs one octave apart.

Sorry - I really thought you answered to my post, because Animisha never wrote about two bass clefs. Her example was all about G-clefs. And I agree, shifting only 1 octave is too little.

BartK Most musicians would just go "meh! whatever!" because the change of clef has a really tiny advantage and a huge disadvantage that you need to change all existing music and teach the new system to everyone.

This is probably the only reason. It was 1672 and is today.
Still, if you exchange the treble clef by a bass-15va clef you get rid of quite some ledger lines. And hands down, I would prefer to read one more ledger line to the bottom than constantly dealing with too many ledger lines on the top. Face it, we have a lot more ledger lines on top of the upper staff. Using a bass-15va instead is simply shifting the staff more toward the center of most notes used for piano playing.

WieWaldi
I think you're overestimating how much of an advantage it is. Like if I look at your earlier picture:

What I see is a scale pattern. The way I would read that (assuming I know that the top clef is 2 octaves higher) is to notice the starting note, notice that it's a simple scale up with a repeated note and a skip of a 3rd (did you notice that? ), and then play it with the expected rhythm. I don't really put much thinking into which specific notes I'm playing because I'm just following a pattern and noticing changes from that pattern. The only note I have to read is the starting note. In real music there is a bit more movement but the idea is similar. You only have to read some strategic notes and you infer the rest using patterns relative to your starting note. This is why I don't think having the same clef in both staves is a huge advantage. It's only a tiny advantage of consistency when finding the starting note but after that you don't really have to care.

WieWaldi Many great and good inventions have been made by beginners.

This may be OT but I'm curious about this. Can you name or describe some inventions that were invented by novices (beginners) and which worked in the field they were relatively unfamiliar with? This is not for the sake of any argument here - I'm genuinely curious.

keystring Sure, I can name Richard van Basshuysen. Today, he is referred as the father of the direct injection engine for diesels. Because other companies failed in this research before, the mother company (VW) was against this research. Nevertheless, Basshuysen was the driving man inside AUDI to make this happen. This is the reason why the today's diesel engines consume 20% less of fuel.
If he was a so called diesel expert of his time, he probably knew it was impossible (because other companies already failed to to) to create a turbo diesel engine with direct injection. But: He didn't know it is impossible, so he did it.

keystring James Watt is another example. He did not invent the steam engine. He was just an engineer who repaired the Newcomen steam engine. By repairing it, he understood how it worked, and he recognized how to lower the heat loss. So he made an improvement to the design to enhance the efficiency.
Back at this time, he was an ordinary engineer, maybe more of a mechanic, but no steam engine expert by any means.

MRC n fact I don't think that would be a problem. In WieWaldi's proposed system, the continuance is at the note D, being on a space at the same distance down from the bottom line of the top clef (1 1/2 spaces) as it is up from the top line of the bottom clef.

I was looking at his reference in the Tantacrul video to three hypothetical clefs named Tr, M, B which all had G as the bottom line. I didn't see anything about D in that discussion, but in fact, we'd end up with D as the middle line. That came to me while taking a nap.

keystring Both men were educated. But not exactly in the field of their biggest achievement.
I might be a piano player beginner, but as a computer engineer I am working with scripting languages all my life. And some scripting languages are graphical constructed, to have a quick overview of the script without the need of reading every text line.

WieWaldi I might be a piano player beginner, but as a computer engineer I am working with scripting languages all my life

As a computer engineer, your work will also have a practical application, am I right? When you work with this scripting language, are you also involved in how it is used and that it is useable?

I tried to stay away from the "about you" or "about anyone here" aspect and keep it an abstract generalization, because this can easily devolve into ad hominem, or hurt feelings.

My attention was caught this morning by this.

WieWaldi You know my opinion, one clef for LH and RH staff is better than having two different clefs.

This seemed to reflect a lack of knowledge or experience regarding piano music. Yes, there are staves, and mostly music played in the lower staff is for the left hand, and music played in the upper staff is for the right hand. Sometimes it isn't - for good or stupid reasons.

More important is the idea of a given clef for the left and right hand. If you are a beginner, you are probably playing music where the LH plays notes that are in the vicinity of below middle C, and the RH plays notes that are in the vicinity above middle C. If so, you're getting a distorted keyhole view of a much larger room.

In piano music, you can have both hands playing below middle C or above middle C. In current notation, you may find the RH playing music in the bass clef. You will also have hands crossing over each other or flipping above, below, or in between. If by chance you have that limited view of piano playing, and you are designing notation for piano playing, I see potential problems.

Any successful design will have testing procedures, experience and knowledge, as part of the process. Both of your examples had that.

It is possible that the system you have in mind will work even if the hands go elsewhere than you expect, and it may do so. But that one statement gave me pause.

keystring Everything is true what you wrote about LH and RH. And I am very aware of it. I was just simplifying it, because most of the time the LH plays the bass clef and the RH plays the treble clef.

And here comes another problem with 2 different clefs. Sometimes when the score has a lot of high notes, the lower staff is written in treble clef and the upper staff is a treble 15va. And suddenly piano players are forced to read the treble clef on the lower staff. Most piano player are not used to do it. This leads to confusion and often to wrong notes during learning. Not to mention how much more difficult this makes sight-reading.
Same happens if the music goes down and both clefs are bass clef (the lower with 15ba). And on top of that, when hands are crossed the RH must play a bass clef, the LH the treble.

It is not only to get rid of learning 1 clef instead of 2 different ones. Currently we are learning 2 clefs, but used in 4 configurations in total (treble/bass is probably used 90% of all sheet music, treble/treble is 5%, bass/bass is 4% and bass/treble is 1%). If you ask me, that is a heck more stuff to learn, compared to a single clef with octave shift indicators.

BartK WieWaldi
I think you're overestimating how much of an advantage it is.

Actually, I underestimated the advantage. There is a big problem many of us piano players face (not only the beginners amongst us):
If both staff lines are treble. Or if both staff lines are bass clef. (One with an octave shift). So many players struggle in this situation, because they are not used to read treble-clef on the lower staff. Or reading bass-clef on the upper staff.
You see, we pianists are forced to learn 2 different clefs. And we train it by daily usage. And as result we are only able to apply the treble-clef for RH and bass-clef for LH. Leaving us screwed if the regular layout is broken and those exceptions come into play.

With everything the same clef, but only for different octave ranges, none of the hurdles happens in the first place.

keystring If your system allows for the fact of what actually exists in music, namely that either hand can play anywhere on the keyboard, then all's good.

Every system allows this (the current treble/bass clef and my proposed bass-clef everywhere). My point is, to get rid of exceptions.