[David W. Fenton:]
>>>Clefs have always been considered as having no musical meaning.
[Michael Edwards:]
>> What is "musical meaning"? . . .
[David:]
>Well, what I mean is that a clef does not tell you anything about how
>to play the notes -- it just tells you *what* the notes are.
To me, that's musical information. You'd be pretty lost if you didn't know
what pitches notes represented.
[Michael:]
>>. . . To me, they clearly have what I would call
>>musical meaning: they decide on the range of pitches that are to be read
>>from a staff of 5 lines that would appear the same except for the clef.
...
>> This is so obvious that perhaps I have misinterpreted your comment,
>>David.
[David:]
>Clefs are not something that have qualitative musical value.
I don't understand that statement. They convey information that would at
least in some situations be difficult to ascertain if the clef weren't there.
That's useful; I don't know if it's qualitative or not.
To me this question is a bit like the old riddle of "If a tree in a forest
falls and there is no-one to hear it, does it make any sound, or not?" It's
about how to define words, not about any actual fact. The riddle is only asking
whether we choose to define a sound as a vibration in the air or as an auditory
perception in someone's mind; it isn't asking about what actually happened.
[Michael:]
>> So the role of the clef became more specialized, and some of its uses
>>were delegated to other notational elements. That's not the same to me,
>>though, as having no musical meaning.
[David:]
>Well, notes and rhythms to me aren't "music," and clefs only indicate
>notes, so they aren't that important.
Am I understanding you correctly? Notes, and their clear notation, aren't
important?
>I was referring to aspects of
>notation that indicate something about the way the music should be
>performed, which is the important part.
Well, they're both important: if you play the notes wrongly, it won't
matter how well you perform them in every other respect - the result will be an
unmusical performance (except, perhaps, in certain aleatoric types of music).
When you'ré talking about the notes, and then the way they're performed,
you're talking about different levels of detail. Some elements of notation will
refer to one level, and some to another. I don't quite see how it's useful to
regard one level of detail as being "music" more than another.
>Clefs contribute nothing there, though clef *changes* might.
That seems pretty hair-splitting to me. Trees and forests again.
Regards,
Michael Edwards.
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