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Re: Clef Notation, Which Octave?

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2020-04-18 18:00

clarnibass wrote:

> Have to disagree. Regardless of how the F (bass) clef would be
> written (and it's always just a 2nd transposition really),

Piston says when a bass clef part shifts to treble clef, the transposition remains a 2nd. And in Death and Transfiguration, it is pretty clear that the treble clef transposition is a 2nd, not a ninth.

I haven't played enough bass parts that switched clefs to know if Piston was wrong historically or if the young Strauss was an outlier - his later bass parts stay in treble clef written a 9th above concert pitch. I have played more obscure pieces where I had to look at the score - the doublings, mostly - to decide what octave was intended. In general, if you've made a switch at bass clef F to avoid a third leger line, you're already at the top of the treble staff (F5) if you transpose a ninth, so within a very few ascending notes you'd again be in leger lines. So, it seems as if a 2nd would serve the purpose better.

In any case, using tenor clef instead of treble doesn't seem like a worthwhile solution to the problem of avoiding leger lines, and even assuming that there's an early edition of D&T out there that did it, it was happily not an idea that caught on.

Karl

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Clef Notation, Which Octave? new

Johnny Galaga

2020-04-14 03:58