These are wonderful!

Re: Lesson 3: Do Clef and Fa Clef

The example cited of moving a clef mid-piece, although certainly real enough, is a little artificial or unfortunate. It occurs in the source manuscript cited as the second line/staff of:

Audit tyrannus an-
xious | adesse regum principem
qui nomen Israel regat | te-
neatque David regiam. ||

The clef for the first staff is C3 (C-clef on line 3 from the bottom).
The clef that begins the second staff is also C3 and after adesse the clef is changed to C2 (C-clef on line 2 from the bottom).
Then for the third and fourth staves, the clef is again C3.

However, one should note that the second staff is a 3-line staff, whilst the other staves are 4-line staves! Moreover, it is only because of the rather narrow compass of the 3-line staff that the clef change is necessary at all. In fact, if that second staff had also been a 4-line staff with the prevailing C3 clef, the chant melody would have fit nicely within the 4-lines and no clef change would have occurred.

Presumably, the lone 3-line staff was used to because of overall vertical spacing issues; however, the second staff could have been a 4-line staff (making a clef change unnecessary), and the fourth staff could have been a 3-line staff with C3 clef without any mid staff clef change being necessary because the range of the fourth staff is rather narrow.

As a side point, in light of the presence of a 3-line staff for Gregorian chant, I remark that there are other instances of 3-line staves as well as 5-line and (rarely) even 6-line staves in various sources. It would seem, then, that the "traditional" 4-line staff for plainchant notation is simply a convenient median amongst possibilities that should not deter present day transcribers from using staves of more or less than 4 lines when appropriate.

Moral: Know and understand your source manuscripts.

Noel (and others): I will only say that I noticed the difference, because, in fact, when reading/singing through the example, I saw that the C3-clef on the second staff was on the top line, instead of the next-to-top line (since I tend to see these clef locations from the top down, rather than from the bottom up) ... and I thought at first there must have been a clef relocation at the beginning of the second staff as well as one after adesse. It was enough to throw me off momentarily, until I noticed that the second staff only had 3 lines, so i figured it might just as well have the same effect on some other people reading through this example.

I stand by my observations above about the 3-line staff in this example presenting its own quirks that might obfuscate things for some people.

Chuck

Our small chant choir often deals with clef movement...frustrating at times but very manageable...the custos is a great friend for us.