• 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        In modern scores, the Soprano and Mezzo-Soprano clefs have been replaced by the treble clef, and the Baritone clef by the bass clef.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.