Thorn Hill wrote:
.... For treble clef, you have your first note; it is a C. For the bass clef, you have your first note; it is a C using bass clef notation. But if you 'pretend' it is a treble clef staff, the C magically becomes an A, which is the root note of the relative minor scale to C major....
This "pretending" is actually useful. It is, in fact, how at-sight transposition is done. Think of it this way- a piano great staff is a treble clef on top and a bass clef on the bottom. One leger line below the treble clef is middle C. One leger line above the bass clef is the same note- this is where the two clefs conjoin. So, imagine moving the two staffs closer to each other on the page so that these middle C leger lines co-incide. Then, extend that co-incided leger line so that it is the same length as the rest of the staff and voila!- there you have, instead of a divided piano great staff, a whalloping big staff of eleven lines. Along with the bass F-clef on the fourth line up from the bottom and the treble G-clef on the fourth line down from the top, both retained in their positions from the squished together piano great staff, you can now add a C clef on the extended line in the middle if you like.
There are actually a few historical examples of whalloping big staffs having been used. That bespeaks of quite a development, one having begun from the single orienting line drawn through heightened neumes for medieval chant. But, whalloping big staffs are hard to look at- it's easy to get lost in the middle. And, though a whalloping big staff may adequately represent a significant proportion of the entirety of the musical gamut, if one wants a map of the whole territory, it is more than is needed to indicate the typical range of one vocal part- it would be like trying to find ones way in a city by using a statewide map. So, over time, a consensus was arrived at that settled on one five line staff, like we use today, as an optimum number of lines with which to strike a balance between conveying as much information to singers as possible while still being comprehensible at a glance. Instruments tend to have wider ranges than voices, so it's a bit more problematic to write for their ranges on one staff, but not impractical- so, except for keyboard instruments, instrumental writing practices followed that vocal lead. As a fairly wide range instrument with potential for dense contrapuntal textures, guitar music approaches a complexity that could have been well served by using a great staff- as Sor did in one instance- but the model that inspired guitar writing at the time that tablature was being left behind came from violin, so that 's how we wound up doing things as we do them today.
So, we use a five line staff- but the whalloping big staff is still present! Imagine yourself scanning up and down the whalloping big staff from top to bottom and back, but first, you have installed a visual app in your head that detects at what point along the vertical axis your eyes are focused. One function of the app is to highlight the five lines immediately surrounding your point of focus while graying out to invisibility all the whalloping big staff lines except for those five. So, what you are seeing is a narrow slit containing a five line extract from the whalloping big staff, sort of like the letter-box format that you can select these days for watching movies on TV. Exactly which five lines of the whalloping big staff are contained within that slit depends on where your gaze is fixed as you look up and down, and this content changes as your gaze travels.
Then a further function of the app is that you can set a selection of one particular five line extract of the whalloping big staff to permanent status, once you've decided upon a useful point from that entire range within which you want to work- which choice would be determined by the range of the voice or instrument for which you are writing, or reading. The piano great staff these days, with temporary exceptions, confines its choices to using just the bottom five and top five lines of the whalloping big staff, but in actuality, you are free to choose any five adjacent lines from the whalloping big staff to set as your working choice. What clef you use, and on what line of your five line selection it is situated depends on what particular five lines you set as permanent. These clefs will appear to move up and down, entering and leaving your visual field while scanning with your app set to drift mode, but remember, it is actually your gaze focus that is moving, not the clefs themselves. It's like the visual illusion of uncertainty as to which train is moving when you are in a train sitting next to another one in a station, and one of them slowly starts to roll. So, the clefs don't move. But, they are given different names depending on where they wind up being situated in your five line selection, and there are seven such names: bass, baritone, tenor, alto, mezzosoprano, soprano, and treble. By convention, the G clef is usually only used for the treble, and the F clef for the both bass and baritone (by setting it on the middle line for the latter) while the rest are different locations of the C clef. Once having set such a selection, remember that the grayed out lines are invisible, but still there, and functional. Leger lines would be little windows that restore short little sections of the grayed out lines to visibility.
Now, imagine that the notes of a musical part that appears to be written directly into this system are actually written on the surface of a transparent overlay. With the in-head app turned off, so that the entire whalloping big staff becomes visible, you are looking thorugh this transparency to see how the notes align with the whalloping big staff underneath. You could then take the notes of that written part, and move them up and down by moving the transparency, thus changing that alignment. When you then stop moving the notes, you can switch your app back on and select to permanency the five lines that most conveniently contain the contour of the part that you have moved.
This is exactly what you are doing when you "pretend" to see a different clef than the one printed on the page you are looking at. The particular pretense you suggest, "seing" a treble clef while looking at a line printed in bass clef, is a way (with appropriate octave register adjustment) to transpose a piece down a minor third- or, to put it a better way, up three fifths in the cycle of fifths. But, in order to effect an actual transpoition that leaves the music intact as to modality, along with the "pretending" of a treble clef, one also has to "pretend" that there is a key signature sharper by three sharps at the beginning of the staff. So, in your example of the bass clef music in C, if it is read as if it were a treble clef and as if there were a key signature of three sharps, the music would emerge intact (with appropaiate octave adjustment) in the key of A major, not A minor. Because the music would not have been printed with that key signature, not all accidentals would be read as printed, i.e., accidentals applied to F's, C,s, and G,s would have to be adjusted up a half step. For instance, if you were to encounter a "pretend" G with an accidental printed as a flat in front of it, you would "pretend" that the flat is a natural sign instead. Accidentals on all notes other than "pretend" F,C, and G would be taken at face value.
This doesn't only work starting with music in the key of C. In reading bass -pretended-as-treble, one makes the key signature adjustment by three jumps in the sharp direction following the circle of fifths. If starting in the key of G, with one sharp, one moves to a key signature with three more sharps, and winds up with one of four sharps- the key of E. If starting with the key of A flat, with four flats, one moves in the sharp direction by removing three flats and winding up in F, with one flat. It's the same operation when moving from one side of the circle of fifths to the other. Starting with the key of B flat, with two flats, the three step jump is first to one flat, to no flats or sharps, and then landing with one sharp, the key of G. Observe that just like the move from C to A, these are all transpositions down a minor third (or up a major sixth, depending on how any octave register adjustment is handled).
This may seem like an exercize in perverse and pointless confusion, but the reason this might be practically useful to guitarists is because there are many scholarly editions of Renaissance lute music with realizations from tablature into piano scores, written on two staves, treble and bass. If the realization assumes a lute with the first course pitched at G, as is a conventional assumption, and one wants to play from the score on a guitar with an E first string, then this is exactly how the notes on the bottom half of the great staff would be read- pretend treble and apply a three sharps key signature adjustment. For the notes on the top half of the staff, a different clef would have to be pretended- a soprano clef, which is a C clef located on the bottom line of the staff. This would change all printed C's in the treble clef to "pretend" A's, just like printed C's in the bass clef become A's when a treble clef is pretended. "Seeing" a soprano clef instead of a treble clef would invoke all the same principles of adjustment as does "seeing" a treble clef instead of a bass; three more sharps in the key signature, and all "new" F's, C's, and G's are read up a half step from where they are printed.
Some piano realizations of lute music assume a lute pitched at A, not G. To read such a score on guitar would entail a similar, but not exactly the same, type of procedure. In this case the transposition would be like moving from A to E, or up only one jump in the circle of fifths. In this case, only one sharp is added to the key signature (or flat subtracted) and the top stave would be read with a "pretend" baritone clef (an F clef on the middle line) and the bottom stave would read as if with a tenor clef (a C clef on the second line from the top). "New" F's with accidentals would be read a half step higher than printed. Also, appropriate octave register adjustments would have to be made.
Different clef substitutions would be made if considering a piano piece or song accompaniment for transcription, or reading Bach chorales for harmonic study. Any possible clef adjustment may crop up as useful.
Just because this procedure can be described with precision does not mean that it is easy to do- in fact it can seem at first to be a head-bendingly laborious proposition. But, this is how it's done, and it can be learned and done. People do become able to a juggle with facility all seven clefs for any transposition that may be necessary. Conductors, for instance, have to be able to do this with immediacy of comprehension. In a recent discussion in another guitar forum, the suggestion was made that for sight reading practice, it is useful for guitarists to read clarinet music, because the written range is the same ( the lowest note being E), and one is forced actually to read just the notes, because there would be no sensible fingering indications to rely on for guidance.
This proposition naturally launched an appurtenant discussion by some who seemed not quite to get the point that it is only the printed range that matters, and who cavilled at clarinets being transposing instruments. For reasons which are no doubt a blend of deference to tradition and the real exigencies precipitated of the physics of cylindrical bore wind instruments, clarinets are made so that their basic key of easiest fingering is B flat. But, for ease of reading, music in B flat is notated as if it were in C. In fact any music written for clarinet is written in a key one whole step higher than it sounds. This is how their parts are printed in orchestral scores.
A conductor, in reading his score, in order to comprehend it, has to "pretend" for clarinet parts that he is seeing a tenor clef instead of a treble, adjust back up an octave, and subtract two sharps from the key signature (or add two flats) thus moving the part back down a step. But, at the same time, he has to be able to discuss with his first-chair clarinetist the clarinet part in terms of the notes the clarinetists are seeing. Therefore that is the part he is given in his score. At the same time he is making this adjustment for clarinet parts, he is also making adjustments for other transposing instruments' parts, some in E flat, or F, sometimes other keys, instead of B flat. Imagine the complexity! Yet, this the world in which they live, and they learn to do it fluently. We can do it too, for our more modest purposes.
Statistics: Posted by guitareleven — Wednesday 11 September 2013, 00:20 am