This

 


Is Not a Bass Clef.

 


But This

 


Is



If you have read the first post in this series, titled This is Not a Treble Clef, you will be able to guess where this one is headed, and you’ll be correct.

 

Just as the G-Clef evolved from a cursive letter G, this clef evolved from a cursive letter F. The two dots show where the note-name F goes. It’s the line that runs between the two dots.





In the first example at the beginning of this post, the F Clef was not also a Bass Clef, because it wasn’t on a staff and therefore could not show where the note name F went. But in the second example, and in the one immediately above this paragraph, the two dots show that the note name F belongs on the fourth line (up from the bottom) and in these two cases, the clef is both an F-Clef and a Bass Clef. This staff is the one that the Men sang from in choirs in the middle ages, just as the Boys with Unchanged Voices sang on the staff that used the Treble Clef.

 

Now, just as you can move the G-Clef up and down to create (usually) the Treble Clef or (rarely) the French Violin Clef, you can move the F clef down to create a new one. The two dots are now above and below the middle line, line three. It’s called the Baritone Clef and it looks like this:



 (You may be relieved to learn that the Baritone Clef is used only in older music. Nobody uses it anymore.)

 

(A side-item: If you put the two dots above and below the top line, the fifth line from the bottom, the result would be called the Sub-Bass Clef, in additiona to still being an F-Clef. It’s a theoretical concept, and I don’t know of any examples where it was ever actually used.)

 

There is another Baritone Clef besides the one we talked about here. It’s not very common, but it does exist, so it’s probably a good idea to mention it briefly. But it doesn’t use either an F-Clef or a G-Clef. Instead, it uses something called a C-Clef, which is the only other note-naming clef beside the two more common ones we already learned.

 

It can be made using two or three different shapes, but the most common one, and the one I prefer, is this:




Now I will have to admit that it doesn’t look anything like a letter C, but that’s supposedly where it came from. (The alternative shapes for the C-Clef don’t look anything like a C either,  any more than this one does, so it’s a bit of a mystery why they’re shaped the way they are. Perhaps cursive writing was very different in the Middle Ages than it is now. (If anyone still uses cursive at all, that is!). Some people think this shape evolved from the cursive letter D, and since that's the first letter of the word Do, and since Do is the Italian name for the pitch that we call 'C,' and since music notation was invented in Italy, I suppose that's a possibility. But I don't think it looks any more like a 'D' that it does like a'C'! 
 
There are several different staff positions for the C-Clef, including Alto, Tenor, and Soprano, in addition to Baritone. But all of that will have to wait for a later post.


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To see other posts in the Music Blog series, you can click HERE.


To see posts in my other series, the Memory Blog, you can click HERE.

 

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