Clefs

Transcribing and Reading White Mensural Notation

Renaissance Music Notation from the mid-16th century

Petrucci's Clefs are models of beauty and clarity, a monument to his type cutter. They are only fairly typical where clefs are concerned, though. Perusal of facsimiles of such manuscripts as Dijon 415 and the innumerable Codeces will give a better idea of common forms than I can give here. These clefs, then, are the ones I've cut from scans of Odhecaton pages:

  G clef (notice how the part that curls around the line where the note g is to be located actually has the shape of the capital letter G!)

  C clef. Often the form of this clef will be different, but always there will be a typographical differentiation near the vertical center of the clef to indicate which line is middle-c. Additionally, we have a flat presented, following the C clef, which sits on B. It is not uncommon to find flats shown at both octave locations if they both fall on the staff, which can give a 2-flat mode the appearance of being a three-flat mode.

  F clef. with two flats, which are both B's. Note that this clef is centered on the center line, making it the equivalent of the modern Baritone clef. All of the clefs of Renaissance music are moveable, and may appear on any line, although by the time of Ohdecaton, the F clef would most often be found on the three upper lines, the G clef on the two bottom lines, and the C clef might be found centered on any of the lines!

 These clefs covered the Gam-Ut from the lowest notes written to the highest, and were employed by choice, generally to reduce or eliminate the need for writing notes outside the five-line staff. It is quite possible, however, to find a part which involves notes higher or lower than the space above or below the staff: in cases like these, the copyist would simply add a line, carrying it on straight through until it wasn't needed again, and then dropping it. There were no individual ledgerlines for each note, as we use today. Also, clef changes in the middle of music were not unheard of, but rather less common in this period than in the late renaissance and Baroque period to come.

 

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