Somebody wrote:
No concert band player, no jazz player, and no orchestral player below college level will ever see tenor clef, and will stop dead and refuse to attempt reading it.
Will you people stop making generalizations which just show how ignorant you really are outside of your little circle of experience. "No" is pretty extreme to say, unless you personally know of every trombone player in the entire world.
I have a trombone student who is in 8th grade, learning tenor clef quite easily and eagerly, thank you very much. She is a musical sponge, absorbing everything I explain to her, and a whole lot more.
I have another young student (also in 8th grade at a different school) who has already learned quite well flute (her main instrument), clarinet, sax (she plays this in the school jazz band), and bassoon. She does take lessons from time to time with a working professional bassoonist to get a different perspective on the bassoon technical issues. She, also, is learning tenor clef and is doing quite well.
I will be teaching both of these young ladies to read alto clef to fill out their reading of the 4 most widely used clefs, as well as making sure they are comfortable reading treble clef on their trombone and bassoon respectively.
So please, whoever made that rash generalization, don't be so sure of yourself. I'm just one private music teacher in an out-of-the-way city in southern New Hampshire and I've got TWO students who are doing the very thing you categorically state that NOBODY their age would do. I am sure if you extrapolate my numbers and take into account all the hundreds of thousands of private teachers in the U.S. alone, many in major metropolitan areas where there are more youth orchestras and school orchestras (there are only 4 school orchestras in my entire state, and only 3 youth orchestras) you will find that there are a lot more young people willing, eager, and able to learn to read the very clefs that you are so confident that NOBODY their age would ever want to learn, than your limited experience would indicate.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
