At 10:14 AM +0100 11/6/10, Florence + Michael wrote:
I recently received the conductor's score of
Gounod's Faust (Henschelverlag Berlin, 1972). I
was surprised to find C-clefs used for the voice
parts in a score this recent: all female voices
are written in soprano clef and the tenors in
tenor clef. I thought this practice had died out
in the 19th century. Can anybody point me to
detailed information about the history of the
use of C-clefs? And does anybody know of other
20th century editions that use them for voice
parts?
Michael
LECTURE WARNING!!!! Delete while you still have a chance!
Gounod is hardly what I'd call a "recent"
composer, since he died in 1910. And that score
is undoubtedly a reprint of a much earlier
edition. But that's actually irrelevant to the
question.
Since Guido d'Arezzo invented the musical staff
and the use of clefs in the early 11th century,
the C clef and the F clef have always been
considered movable, and they WERE moved in music
in order to keep most of the notes within the
staff. (Apparently the monks copying music had
to cock their wrists at an awkward angle to draw
ledger lines, so this was important to them.)
When the G clef was added in the 15th century, it
was also considered movable. So the three clefs
were used in 9 different ways:
G on bottom line (French violin clef, used 17th-18th centuries)
G on second line (the familiar "treble" clef)
C on bottom line (soprano clef, used by Bach
for his boys' voices and for the right hand of
much of his keyboard music)
C on 2nd line (mezzo-soprano clef, used for
d'amore winds, low violins, high violas)
C on 3rd line (alto clef, used for violas,
violas da gamba, alto sackbutts, alto voices,
etc.)
C on 4th line (tenor clef, used for tenor voices, tenor instruments)
F on 3rd line (baritone clef, often used in
madrigals when the "bass" part lies high)
F on 4th line (the familiar "bass" clef)
F on 5th line (sub-bass clef, most often found in Venetian polychoral music)
Now the important point is that this was not just
theoretical. Musicians were trained in this
system, and were trained to read and think in all
9 movable clefs. This was beginners' stuff! And
that training continued well into the 20th
century, although not necessarily in the U.S.
But Nadia Boulanger was still teaching the 9
clefs into the mid-20th century, according to one
of my grad school professors who had studied with
her in Paris.
As to editions using the 9 clefs, most of the
first generation of collected works, dating from
the middle of the 19th century and into the 20th,
made a point of reproducing the original
manuscripts as closely as possible, including the
original clefs and the original note values. The
Bach-Gesellschaft edition reproduced all of
Bach's original clefs, and since it is now in the
public domain it has been widely reprinted and is
available on line and on CDs.
The three kinds of people who have to be able to
read the 9 movable clefs include: (a)
Musicologists, who deal with original manuscripts
and prints in which those clefs were used, and
others who may do similar research including
conductors; (b) Conductors who delve into the
earlier repertoire and may run into those clefs
at any time (my first doctoral seminar studied
the Brahms Requiem, and our professor had
pre-ordered the Kalmus reprint of the score,
which had the voice parts in the clefs Brahms
used--soprano, alto, tenor and bass); and (c)
early music singers and players who may very well
run into those clefs in scores copies out of
collected works editions and other Dankmäler and
similar editions (New York Pro Musica performed
from many of these editions, which Noah Greenberg
unearthed in various libraries, and they simply
HAD to read them).
As a bonus, once you have learned to use the
entire system of movable clefs, they are
incredibly useful for transposing music. Arthur
Squires, who sang tenor with New York Pro Musica,
had dead perfect pitch and could not sing music
that was not in the key they were singing in, BUT
he read the clefs and used them to transposed
mentally.
So no, I would have to say that the 9 movable
clefs did NOT disappear in the 19th century.
They were alive and well. In fact the musical
scholars who worked on those Collected Works
editions could read them perfectly well
themselves, and saw nothing wrong with
reproducing the original clefs. I would say,
rather, that in the U.S. at least, they died out
of common use and were no longer taught in the
20th century, and that is kind of a shame and is
something of an oversimplification in our system
of music education. I wasn't taught them,
although I learned to read alto clef playing
viola, and I had to stumble through them in grad
school in score reading classes and musicology
classes.
And of course the notation of vocal tenor parts
has baffled more than one publisher! The treble
clef is incorrect because it shows the wrong
octave. The tenor C-clef had no such problem.
At least one publisher--I think it was
Novello--used a doubled treble clef, apparently
on the theory that 2 treble clefs weighed twice
as much as one, and pulled the pitch down an
octave!! And modern notation programs provide
the tenor G-clef with a little 8 under the clef
for accuracy (which drives piano accompanists
nuts!). But that's OK, since in the words of
Anna Russell, tenors have resonance where their
brains ought to be, so we can't really expect
them to read music, right?
END OF LECTURE!
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:john.how...@vt.edu)
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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