Clef switching--UGH!

October 24, 2006 at 11:28 AM

As I'm scrubbing away at Wohlfahrt, it's coming back to me: problems with the clef switch. UGH.

One problem is that I remember all these etudes from when I learned them on the violin the first time. They're just transposed down a fifth, and the fingerings are the same. This is helping my fingers get stronger, but it's not helping me learn alto clef.

I can't just go cold turkey and ignore treble clef altogether: I sing soprano in a church choir and have to read that music. I am teaching my daughter violin and have to read treble clef for that too. And, I already taught myself bass clef when I taught myself piano . . . and I feel like that's enough clefs already! My brain is not able to handle it. Sometimes I have to admit I just stare at the page and it's like my mind shuts off and says "I give up." Is that an A? An F? No, it's just an open G.

It gets me back to wondering: what do other people say to themselves in the back of their minds when they read music? I still "say" some combination of violin fingerings, mostly first position violin fingerings. And those are overlaid, mentally, on top of a string "color"; not verbal exactly, but almost. Verbal combined with other senses. Like a drone of "G, G, G," combined with the proprioceptive feeling of playing on the G in the right hand (the pressure, the position, the feeling of pushing the bow across the string), underneath the 1,2,3 or whatever the fingers are.

So now I've made some progress developing a "C,C,C" mental underlay to think about when I'm playing on the C string, but I'm not there yet.

It's a lot like learning a second (or in this case, third) language. I was a decent sight-reader on violin, but I'm terrible on viola. My teacher said she made the switch very quickly when she first started. Within 10 days of picking up a viola for the first time, she was playing the viola part in a string quartet in front of an audience. But I'm still stopping, counting, and writing the fingers above the notes.

Would flash cards help me? Some other etudes that I don't remember from my violin days?

From Ben Clapton
Posted on October 24, 2006 at 12:32 PM

The way I really learnt alto clef was to be thrown in the deep end. Basically, I'd learnt it a bit (using the "Tune a day" series, which I hadn't used when I was starting on the violin, and Strictly Strings which I was familiar with), and then was asked to play viola for a Uni orchestra... so basically I needed to know the alto clef. Did fairly well, and can read and play from it now if required.

From Karen Allendoerfer
Posted on October 24, 2006 at 2:31 PM

I've never understood how that works. Supposedly people can learn languages that way too--they go to a country where they don't know the language and they somehow magically "pick it up" when they are "forced" to. But I've been in sink or swim situations like that before, and when I am, I don't swim, I sink.

From Peter Ouyang
Posted on October 24, 2006 at 7:02 PM

Yeah, learning the clef is the worst part of picking up the viola. It gets easier. It took me a couple of months to get comfortable sight-reading in alto clef.

If you don't have it yet, you should definitely get a copy of the Bach cello suites. I learned alto clef by a combination of shamelessly picking through the cello suites one note at a time, in addition to the sink-or-swim immersion of playing in an orchestra.

From Karen Allendoerfer
Posted on October 24, 2006 at 8:37 PM

Since my goal is to try out for a pretty good, semi-professional, orchestra, I don't think I have the luxury of sinking for a few months there before I learn to swim.

So I've recently been thinking that maybe I should postpone the goal of my dream orchestra for a little while and try a student or student-ish orchestra instead. Somewhere where mistakes won't be so unusual, at least . . .

From Tommy Atkinson
Posted on October 25, 2006 at 7:21 PM

get a book of orchestral excerpts or Mozart quartets and read through the whole things. Then learn some of the cello suites. You'll probably have "violin-moments" for a while, but the more you play and read, the more you learn, even though it's really hard at first.

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Clef switching--UGH!

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