And there was one other thing I wanted to say in my last post and forgot: The higher clef tends to suggest to a player a soloistic role. This is obviously not a necessity, but in instruments that mostly play in the bass clef (cello, gamba), a move to a different clef often represents a passage that lies up in the highly expressive and soloistic register of the instrument, often involving the higher and more difficult positions on the upper strings. So, I would suggest staying in the instrument's default clef except when the passage is soloistic or unless it would be otherwise fiendishly difficult to read.
Of course, for viola da gamba, the question is: what is the default clef? It's not so clearcut as with cello or viola. There are actually two different functions for the gamba, a solo instrument (division viol) and a non-solo instrument (consort viol). The division viol is usually built to be slightly smaller than the consort viol, and designed to sound best on the top 4 strings. The fingerboard is also going to extend further up towards the bridge than is required for a mere consort bass. The consort instrument, on the other hand, is going to be built to sound best on the bottom 4 strings, and with the assumption that it's going to be playing the role of bass instrument in most of its playing. So, bass clef is associated with the musical role of bass instrument, while alto clef is associated with the role of a soloist. Of course, there's the added complication that basses often end up playing tenor viol parts (there aren't enough tenor viol players to go around), and because the repertory also has a substantial body of works in which there are parts that would fall very low on a tenor viol (the bottom two strings of both treble and tenor viol are not very reliable from instrument to instrument; on most garden-variety instruments, the bottom string is useless, and on many cheapo instruments both of the bottom two strings are completely useless; it's the rare treble or tenor where both bottom strings are musically usable), but work beautifully on the bass. But those parts are written exclusively in the alto clef (since the common practice is that they were played on either bass or tenor). So, in addition to absolute range, you have to consider the musical function of a passage within the context of the given piece, since the clefs have generalized associations. And that's my guess as to why the tenor clef is used in the cello repertory -- as a possible marker of a switch to a soloistic function. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
