• MRC

  • Post #58

WieWaldi Sam pointed out, this small 8 above or below the cfef sign is easy to overlook for old eyes

Not only for old ones. I've seen competent young readers with excellent eyesight get tripped up by these clefs.

There are many cases where one of these clefs is implied, but a normal treble or bass clef is used. In a lot of choral music, the tenor part is written in treble clef, but everybody knows that it should sound an octave lower. Similarly, piccolo parts are written in treble clef, but sound an octave higher. And contrabass parts are usually written in bass clef, but sound an octave lower. Some editions use one of the clefs with the little 8 above or below, but many just don't bother.

      MRC I beg to differ. Maybe I could have put it more precisely: the place of a note on the page is associated with a particular position on any string on which it can be played.

      Well that I agree with. But what you wrote made it sound as if a note only has one single location. That is true for piano or any keyboard, but not string instruments. The problem was with your wording.

      MRC The important thing is this: if I see 8va written above that passage, I don't instantly know where those notes are on any particular string.

      I felt iffy about the 8va idea as well. When I saw a D with 8va somewhere up there, my reflex had my hand go to the A string because there's an association. I would have played an octave too low.

      MRC If you audition as a violinist for a British orchestra, you will find that reading is absolutely crucial.

      I would think so. But I rarely saw notation or reading discussed in violin fora, whereas it's always discussed in piano fora. I cannot see reading as a crucial problem and the reasons for that are rather clear. I didn't complete my thoughts either, it seems. 🙂

            MRC The problem is not that there are those octave shifted clefs. The problem is how the symbol looks like. But if one wants to play a piece and practices it over and over again, this small marks are not a problem at all, because very soon the player memorizes where to pay attention to those details.

                WieWaldi But if one wants to play a piece and practices it over and over again, this small marks are not a problem at all, because very soon the player memorizes where to pay attention to those details.

                Playing something over and over again is not a practical way of doing music. This gets into a whole set of other aspects of working on pieces and so on. It would have to be another thread, or existing threads on such topics.

                  • MRC

                  • Post #62

                  WieWaldi The problem is not that there are those octave shifted clefs. The problem is how the symbol looks like.

                  Agreed. The two clefs we currently use for piano music look totally different and are immediately recognisable, which is very important when reading fast. If there's a clef change I immediately see which region of the keyboard my hand needs to move to:

                  (Beethoven op. 53)

                  I'm happy that we don't have more than one G clef. When reading fast, it's really easy to confuse the treble clef and the French violin clef, but happily we only use the treble. If we were only to use the French violin clef I'm sure I could adapt as well!

                    So far nobody mentioned the C-clef. The reference note is the middle-C. There are variations of it including Tenor, Alto & Soprano for voices in a choir. The Alto clef is used by just 1 instrument (viola) which is the bigger version of a violin with the 4 strings tuned 1 octave higher than a cello: C-G-D-A instead of G-D-A-E on a violin.

                    An Alto clef the middle-C is in the middle of the staff. A Tenor clef it's 2nd line from the top. A Soprano clef it's 1st line from the bottom.

                      thepianoplayer416 So far nobody mentioned the C-clef. The reference note is the middle-C.

                      An important thing to mention, and glad you did. I think I might have talked about it here - but it's a long thread.
                      Here are all of them. (I rather like this clef because it points so definitely, and better than the G clef's swirly-gig, or the F clef's dotty things.)

                        • MRC

                        • Post #65

                        There is a fifth C clef, the Baritone Clef:

                        If you take the grand staff,

                        the five C clefs fill the space of all possible 5-line clefs between the treble and bass clefs.

                        Do you need them all? Only if you are working with old scores. (Or if you study Solfège at an advanced level. But I'd better not get started on that subject!)

                        In modern scores, the Soprano and Mezzo-Soprano clefs have been replaced by the treble clef, and the Baritone clef by the bass clef. The only C clefs that are still used are the Alto and Tenor clefs.

                        The alto clef is used by viola and alto trombone, the tenor clef by cello, contrabass, bassoon and tenor trombone, and possibly some other bass instruments that I'm forgetting. Conductors need to be able to read something like this (from the overture to Mozart's Zauberflöte):

                        In the 19th and 20th orchestral reductions I've worked on, I've only seen treble, alto, tenor, and bass clefs. Of course you have the many different transpositions, and some instruments are written in octave higher than they sound. For example: low Bb horns (with an additional whole step transposition!), certainly string bass.

                        • MRC

                        • Post #67

                        In 17th century music you can find all these clefs. During the 18th century the mezzo-soprano and baritone clefs stopped being used, but the soprano clef was still standard for vocal music well into the 19th century.

                        Here are a few bars from Beethoven's 9th Symphony:

                        You can still find the soprano clef in later vocal scores: Verdi's Rigoletto, for instance.

                        6 days later

                        • TLH21

                        • Post #68

                        Animisha Anybody who sings tenor knows this approach well. Although also the feeling of being dumped on as the composer or arranger randomly switches between bas clef and the treble clef an octave down, sometimes in the same line of music.