In this course, we will study music through the lens of a few of its most basic components: melody, harmony, and rhythm. There are other building blocks of music, such as texture, orchestration, and lyrics, but we will focus on melody, harmony, and rhythm because the unique ways in which a muscial genre combines these three concepts will help us understand the least intuitive rules and strategies that define the style. Or more simply put: we will establish a framework for understanding the parts of music that are most difficult to study.
While much of our beginning examples will study the widely-used standards of Western art music from the Renaissance through the Romantic eras, any music that that grew out of this tradition–including almost all popular music today–can be better understood using the tools we use in analyzing tonal harmony. As such, when possible, we will analyze music from a wide variety of styles and genres to better test the tools that we use to study.
By the time most musicians begin formally exploring music theory, they likely are familiar with basic music notation–treble and bass clefs, staves, ledger lines, and accidentals–due to time spent performing. If you are uncomfortable with any of aspect of these concepts, you can review by reading the explanations under the Further Reading section of Discussion 1a.
Even though most college music students are familiar with reading music, most are partial to the clef associated with their primary instrument or voice-part. It is vital that musicians be fluent in not only the two most common clefs–treble and bass–but also with two additional clefs: alto clef and tenor clef. Alto and tenor clefs are often used by instruments such as viola, cello, trombone, and bassoon. They alleviate the use of ledger lines in the extreme registers of an instrument and appear regularly in even the most elementary music.
Treble clef is sometimes referred to as the G-clef, and bass clef as the F-clef. Alto and tenor clefs are known as C-clefs. So let’s piece together the notes and octave relationships between the clefs as well as why the clefs have these alternate names.
In the examples below:
Knowing this, use these examples to find:
Clefs have secondary names because each clef is centered around the pitch in its name. The bass clef’s dots surround an F, and the two C-clefs are centered on middle C. Treble clef, however, not only encircles the G at the center of its spiral, but it evolved from a stylized G. For a short and fun article on the evolution of clefs, I suggest reading Jimmy Stamp’s The Evolution of the Treble Clef from the Smithsonian website.
The octave relationship for each clef is the most important thing you can remember from this discussion, and the easiest way to demonstrate this is to look at where middle C sits on each clef. Below, you can see the note names for the lines and spaces of each clef, and middle C is highlighted at the beginning of each staff.
From these two examples, it is easy to see the necessity of clefs. Ledger lines are an important notation tool, but too many ledger lines becomes difficult to read quickly. Therefore, each clef highlights a specific range that can be written without employing ledger lines. Alto clef is typically thought of as a lower extension for treble clef; it adds the visual space of seven steps from treble clef. Tenor clef is a higher extension for bass clef and adds the visual space of five steps from bass clef. Of course, alto and tenor clef have similar ranges and one of the other could likely be eliminated with little issue–alto clef is visually seven steps from either treble or bass clef making it a middle ground for both–but because both of these clefs have been widely used for more than a century, it is necessary for all musicians to be familiar with reading them.
When asked about their methods, past students suggested working on clefs via: