I'm in full agreement, this is the most extraordinary drivel  A musical manifestation of "political correctness".

In many older scores (I mean pre-Palestrina) there wasn't a "bass clef" at all - by which I mean there was no clef which marked the position of the "f-line".  Instead c-clefs which denoted the top line of the stave as middle-c were used.  I'm quite comfy with c-clefs, I think because I play the viola (very badly) - but like Opilec I've waded around in a lot of early choral music.  I find I use c-clefs not really to know "aha, that is the note G, and so I shall sing one", but to see the relative distances between notes...  "up a fourth, down a third, three notes the same and then one down a tone" etc.

Was anyone else obliged as part of their studies to score-read at the piano from Bass-Tenor-Alto-and-Soprano clefs?  (by Soprano I mean a c-clef on the bottom line).  I thought this was the pottiest idea imaginable since no corpus of music exists in this format.  

Is "violin clef" (g' above middle c placed on the bottom line) still used at all?  I seem to remember finding it in Rameau, Delalande etc.

BTW Opilec, it is a pleasure to see you once again amongst the Silent Shades and Fair Elysian Groves

One tremendously useful aspect of reading c-clefs is that if you ever have to read a transposing instrument part to concert-pitch,  they can be very handy.   For example, I was going through Schubert's "Shepherd On The Rock" with a singer, and the clarinet part in the score is notated "in transport" in Bb.   But if you read it as the Tenor Clef (plus an octave higher) you're sorted

I think I probably need to undergo Aversion Therapy for fugues...   even the mention of the word causes a severe physical reaction in me, and I imagine myself to be in some grim red-brick provincial church in Britain, in the middle of a pew so I can't quietly sneak-out and go home, listening to a grim performance of The Messiah by an amateur choral society with organ accompaniment,  with only Tea & Biscuits (Mrs Herbert's Ginger Fancies - the mother of the more wobbly of the two sopranos) in the Parish Room at half-time to look forward to.   You know those concerts where you are looking at their sheet-music,  desperately hoping for the moment when you can see the light shining through the back cover, indicating we are at last on the final page?    But it could be worse - it might have been "Elijah" instead    

BTW, related to the original message - there is here in Moscow a professional conductor (I use the term to indicate that he has salaried work waving his hands, rather than to intimate some element of competence) who cannot read the bass clef.  He conducts operas from a vocal score, in which he's marked the more important musical cues in red pencil.  (Anyone who has ever had to use the "score" provided by the d'Oyly Carte publishers will know what I mean here).   Frankly I didn't believe this story at first, but a glance at his music-desk in the pit in the interval bore-out the truth of this story.  I would like to be able to say that he turns in first-rate results despite all this, but sadly, that would be a wicked and terrible falsehood.  This is not a theatre which presents operetta or musicals - he does this in anything from Puccini to Humperdinck to Lortzing (by way of Wolf-Ferrari and Mussorgsky).

Could you expand upon this with some examples - maybe not here, but on the Music in Universities thread?


Musicology of all types for the most part does not by any means ignore the technical aspects of music. There are a few (such as the American musicologist Gary Tomlinson) who believe 'close reading' should be assigned less of a central position in musicology in favour of wider contextualisation (this was the subject of debates between him and Lawrence Kramer); I don't go all the way there with Tomlinson, but on the other hand don't think his arguments are entirely without merit - making a fetish out of the work as self-contained object, as much earlier Anglo-American musicology has done, is a very limited approach and itself frequently has an 'up its own fundament' quality about it. Looking at the technical aspects of music in isolation only shows 'what' in a very narrow sense; more sophisticated forms of musicology are also asking 'why', and 'how' in a sense that requires a deeper understanding of the 'what'.

(cue protests from Alistair at this point! )

Mozart isn't "my period" and I haven't made any intentional survey of the sources... but the vocal works of Mozart which I know have invariably had the soprano line in the soprano clef...   in other words, for them it was the usual clef in which they read their music.   And C-Clefs are marvellous in that once you know one of them,  you can quickly adapt to any of the others, on the basis of "this is what I know already,  just with the top line gone, and a new lower one at the bottom where I used to see leger-lines" (if, for example, switching from Alto to Tenor).   Or, if I may be allowed the risky pleasure of paraphrasing Ian - "they're only the dots, and not the music itself" :-)

I thought the Bass Clef was a music club in Brixton

Yes, this is absolutely true, although this practice is restricted to British brass bands...  the German ones (for whom composers like Hindemith wrote music, and which have flugels instead of cornets, and have mellophones) use "proper" clefs and transpositions.  I think it not only enabled a bit of switching about between instruments (although embouchure issues prevent much of that - a cornet-player won't get far on a Bb Baritone, or vice versa) but also to make tuition on theory of music easier...  any bandsman (or woman) could help out a youngster still learning the ropes.  I mention this because the aspect of "accomplishing social good" was very important to the founding of Brass Bands in Britain...  many are connected with the "Chapel" tradition, or Temperance movements, or with Quaker factory-owners etc...   the ultimate aim was not mere band concerts, but a more caring and integrated society.  Tuition and membership was free, instruments were on free loan, and tea and biscuits were often provided in the break.  My own first group music-making was in a band exactly like this.

Well, Brian Ferneyhough certainly claims to have first learned instrumental technique by playing all the instruments of his local brass band in turn. (And it's true, incidentally, that almost all his early music is for wind - although I don't know many other C20th composers who've written quite such a precocious major work for string quartet, as BF did in his early twenties ...)

I'm actually a trombonist (occasionally, these days like your playing mode I guess). The computer in the other place selected my monicker. You might recall the Horniman Museum in SE London which is a mile or 2 from my bunker-
Cliff Bevan (Temperance 7, RLPO) was up there recently to open a new display of vintage brass (its actually a reduced display from the old rambling corucopia, which is a shame, Blair/ Jowelly -ised now). I am itching to have a
go on some of these things. As you say, unique sound. For a short while the 'Queens Hall Orchestra' played Wagner etc under Mackerras, but the audience is sadly specialist and it seems to have folded. Totally agree about sostenuto and smallbore- Sibelius 7/Mahler 3  for example must have been a very different proposition back then.
The old cornets are a wonderul sound-Les (who I think must have played Dixieland too led  the village band I was in and used to lecture about physical culture in post-Victorian mode. More power to your cornet doodling.