things kevin hates

Think back, for a moment, to your 4th grade music class, when you learned to play the recorder. Yeah, it was a colossal waste of time. But you probably learned “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “F-A-C-E.” Those are the notes of the treble clef. Pretty easy to remember, right? But, as you probably realized, it takes a lot of practice to get used to it, and most people probably gave up on that stupid interest and lost any interest in playing music. But there are certainly a great many music-literate musicians and singers out there, and they know that it takes time to learn something like this. And it turns out that there’s a whole host of different clefs. Any clef (there’s actually a whole bunch of them) takes some time to learn.

The next-most commonly seen clef (after the treble clef) is the bass clef. It’s used fairly frequently for some or all of the male parts in choral music, and is also seen in virtually any piano sheet music (aside from fake books). Now, if you spend the time, you’ll eventually get the bass clef down pat. But why on earth does music have to be written in the bass clef? Well, because it’s lower than the stuff in the treble clef, yes. But every time I see a grand staff, all I can think is “Wow, what a missed opportunity.” Middle C is the note on the first ledger line above the bass clef, and the first ledger line below the treble clef. If there were one more ledger line in between the staves, the notes on the bottom half would have the same names as the corresponding notes on the treble clef, but two octaves lower. You’d never have to bother with learning “Good Boys Do Fine Always” and “All Cows Eat Grass.” You could just write a treble clef with some extra symbol to indicates that it’s two octaves lower than a regular one. The fact that music notation doesn’t work this way pisses me off. The B below middle C would be between some ledger lines, but that’s no big deal. You’d also be able to indicate a lower range in what was formerly the bass clef—it’d be the same range as the subbass clef mentioned on the already-linked Wikipedia page. So you’d need fewer ledger lines down below the lower clef. I always hate it when I’m trying to figure out what a note is when it’s eighteen ledger lines below the staff.*

And plenty of times, using the bass clef is just annoying. For example, as I may have already mentioned, I’m in a production of Footloose right now,** and the vocal score gives some bass/baritone parts in the treble clef, and some in the bass clef. (Granted, I think the songs that have choral parts written in the bass clef are lower than the ones that just have treble clef, but still.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bass/baritone choral part in any musical (and I’ve done dozens) that went lower than a G or an A (bottom of the bass clef). Those would only be two ledger lines or two ledger lines and a space below the treble clef. But I’ll routinely see bass and tenor parts written in the bass clef, sometimes all the way up to an F, which requires just as many ledger lines. And the high Fs are far more common than the low As and Gs. I’m sure there are probably some operas where the bass clef is more useful than the treble clef for the low male parts, but in musical theatre (which is, as I’ve already noted, overrun with tenors), the bass clef is hardly ever truly called for.

The bass clef is a clef that should never have been popularized in its present form, and even if it continues to exist, should be used far less in vocal music.

* Okay, this is an exaggeration. And usually, the 8vb notation fixes this. And for the most part, I’m just playing whatever bass note the chord symbol tells me to anyway. But I like a legible bass clef for the occasions when I do bother to look at it.

** See, I told you I’d sneak more self-promotion into my posts.