winterfirelight

*mindblown.gif*

Okay, so, clefs. If you've seen piano music you know how it's got two staffs, one for the right hand / high notes and one for the left / low notes. The staffs have a squiggle on the left end of them: the high one has a sort of loopy thing and the low one has a sort of 7 or 2 with a couple of dots. These are clefs, specifically treble clef and bass clef. They tell you what pitch the notes on the staff represent.

Technically the symbols are a G clef and an F clef: the spiral at the centre of the treble squiggle is always on a note that's a G, and the two dots on the bass are always on a note that's an F. Technically if you put the symbols on other lines you'd indicate different pitches. In practice, these days nobody does that, and 'G clef' and 'treble clef' are synonymous, as are 'F clef' and 'bass clef.'

Violin music is written in treble clef. Cello music is (mostly) written in bass clef. The range of notes you can easily play on those instruments more or less coincides with what you can easily write in those clefs without egregious use of extra ledger lines for notes above/below the staff.

There's also another clef symbol. The C clef symbol looks like a capital B, and the middle of the two humps is always on a note that's a C. It's used to indicate two uncommon clefs. Alto clef gets used for viola music and nothing else as far as I know, and tenor clef gets used for cello music that's off in the upper registers of the cello. Alto clef is... honestly I don't know what its relation to treble clef is, other than "lower," I think it's a sixth lower? Maybe a seventh? I don't read treble clef very well so I don't really know.

Tenor clef is a fifth higher than bass clef. This makes it really convenient for cello music. The strings on a cello (or violin or viola) are a fifth apart, so if you're used to reading bass clef for cello then tenor is the same thing just one string up.

A viola is a fifth lower than a violin, and an octave higher than a cello. If you put 'octave strings' on a viola, it plays the same notes as a cello. A tenor viola is an octave lower than a violin, and a fifth higher than a cello.

Which means it can natively play music in tenor clef. Hence the names.

Here endeth the classical music neepery for the day.