Klarinet Archive - Posting 000362.txt from 1997/09

From: "Tahna Britton" <tahnab@-----.com>
Subj: Re: treble clef
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 1997 14:00:21 -0400

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't have that big of a problem
reading the notes above or below the staff. My first instrument was piano,
and even on that instrument I encountered quite a few ledger lines, of
course, not quite as many as on clarinet. I don't know why we don't use
8va notations. This seems like it would be a easy and faster way to both
write and read music. I understand what Mark is saying about manuscripts
being hard to read, but I have found that most of the time, if someone has
bad notation skill, the whole piece is hard to read!!! Why don't we use
8va notations?? I'm going to have to try to look that one up.

----------
> From: Mark Charette <charette@-----.com>
> To: klarinet@-----.us
> Subject: Re: treble clef
> Date: Sunday, September 07, 1997 4:23 PM
>
> I'm starting to think that possibly my question wasn't as
> naive' as I thought. The range of answers to why the treble
> clef has been:
>
> 1) Because
> 2) Because we'd have to learn a different clef (and I answer - bah!
> So what? You had to learn treble. Clefs just ain't all that hard.)
>
> The range of answers to why we don't use 8va for the altissimo
> register has been:
>
> Dead silence
>
> I understand the rationale behind using the same clef(s)
> for differently pitched instruments (we use the same fingering).
>
> Any of you who've written saying that ledger lines aren't all
> that bad tried sight-reading manuscript? What brought this whole
> question on for me was sight reading some exercises in my
> lesson book, "The Study of Clarinet" by William Stubbins. Some
> of the exercies were written in by a grad student with bad
> handwriting skills (I presume); I've had to stop dead in my
> tracks to figure out which note was indicated since the spacing
> is bad in places. We read music using the relative spacing as
> indicators; when you read manuscript with ledger lines drawn in
> you can be misled easily.
>
> Even pros have this problem (some errors in modern scores can be
> traced back to misread manuscript, and the more you're outside of a
> staff, the greater the chance for error).
> --
> Mark Charette "How can you be in two places at once
> charette@-----.com when you're not anywhere at all?"
> http://sneezy.mika.com/clarinet - Firesign Theater