Why the bass clef exists in music. Take the piano, why can’t the left hand on all pieces just be in the treble clef like the right?
In: 86
I’m going to assume you know a little bit about the way a piano is laid out and music in general because of this question.
For an instrument like the flute that really only has about three octaves of range, treble clef works great. They start on middle C which is only one ledger line below the treble clef staff, then the treble clef staff covers a little less than two octaves, meaning flute players only ever have to play about one octave of ledger lines above the treble clef staff. Most of what they do is concentrated on or closely around the treble clef staff, making music reading easy and fast.
A piano is very different. It can cover seven octaves, although most of the music is concentrated within the five middle octaves. Therefore, we need to use more than one staff to represent the notes, as five octaves worth of ledger lines above or below a single staff would be kind of wild and difficult to read.
I think your question is: why don’t we just use two treble clefs and assume that the lower treble clef is actually an octave below a higher treble clef? Well, the top line of the treble clef is an F. So for the “left hand treble clef” which F would that be? If it’s the F above middle C for the left hand, then there’s a bunch of overlapping notes that could be written on one staff or the other, and you’re losing out on a lot of real estate since you’re kind of trying to cover a lot of notes with just two staves.
If it’s the F below middle C, then you’ve kind of got this awkward amount of space between the staves where you’re using a lot of ledger lines in between two different staves and it gets a little confusing to read. Plus, they’re not really symmetrical because the left hand staff will have to ledger lines to get up to middle C while the right hand staff will only use one ledger line to get down to it.
When you use a bass clef instead, all of the left hand notes are shifted up by two notes from where they would be on the treble clef. Instead of F, the top line now represents an A. That means that we only need one ledger line to get up to middle C, and the two staves connect smoothly and evenly to represent all the notes in between. It fits much better with our intuitive sense of how the piano is laid out, with middle C being the center of the entire grand staff (bass clef and treble clef together).
Finally, there are other instruments that have smaller ranges that are just better centered from G-A than they are E-G. For example, the voice part of “bass” in a choir is considered to be from the low E to middle C, meaning it’s perfectly centered on the base staff whereas you would need some ledger lines on one side of the treble clef and they would be some notes on the other side of the treble clef that weren’t being used at all. A double bass in the orchestra is similar: its lowest note is an e (one ledger line below the bass clef staff) but it goes up an octave above the bass clef staff. If we changed that to treble clef it would never go below the treble clef at all, stopping on the e of the bottom line, but it would go more than an octave above, making it more difficult to read the ledger lines.
The bass clef is just better in some situations at representing the range of an instrument with the least amount of ledger lines possible. That’s really the reason that we use any clefs at all.
Latest Answers