The brace --{--at the beginning of all piano music is probably the most important symbol to observe. It tells us that both hands are playing together. It creates a grand staff with five lines and four spaces in the treble, five lines and four spaces in the bass. Between these two staves are the B below middle C, middle C itself (always written on its own line), and the D above middle C.
Jazz players, who frequently read a single musical staff with chord symbols above it, sometimes complain at having to deal with a grand staff. Players of melodic or single staff instruments (virtually all instruments except keyboards and guitar) often say that they're fine on "right hand" but can't do "left hand".
The reason for the difficulty is that when the eyes are accustomed to scanning left to right the way you read a book, they sometimes have to be taught to look up and down so that they can see both parts of the grand staff. Last year some piano friends and I did an experiment on sight-reading. We all had two pages of written music and a pencil. The exercise was to draw a line on the score showing exactly where your eyes tracked the music. The quickest music sight-readers circled the brace, key signature, time signature, clef signs, then darted up and down, zig-zagging their gaze.
Sometimes I use a pencil to direct a student's eyes up and down.
The brace which creates the grand staff is important to advanced pianists as well as to beginners. In choral music, often there are four staves in addition to the piano part on a single page; the brace shows the pianist where to look. The same applies to piano duet music and conductors' scores. The brace always heads out the piano part.
Vocabulary
Brace: The { symbol which connects the treble (high) staff with the bass (low) staff.
Melody: The tune or easily recognizable part of a piece of music, always one note at a time.
(Diagram from A Workbook for Organic Piano Playing, copyright 1977 by Michaele Benedict)
