Clef Signs and Piano Duets

To the non-musician, the treble clef sign is just an icon representing music; the bass clef sign is a mystery, and the other clef signs are nothing but hieroglyphics. To the musician, however, the clef signs are fixed stars. They show the unchanging location on the lines or spaces of a particular music note, and just as you can find your way by knowing East, all the other notes may be found from the one.

The treble clef sign shows the G above middle C and the bass clef sign shows, between its dots, the fixed location of the F below middle C. The less familiar clef signs fix the location of middle C and are used by cellists, violists, trombone players and others who spend lots of time in that desert between the top line of the bass clef and the bottom line of the treble. Tenors in choirs use a treble clef which sometimes has a little figure eight at the bottom, since their notes are sung or played an octave lower than written.

“Treble” means high and “Bass” means low. Most pianists are used to having the right hand on the higher notes and the left on the bottom. We never take the clef signs for granted, however, since both hands could play in either treble or bass.

In the wonderful world of piano duets, it is common practice for primo or prima (the high part) to play using two treble clefs, with secondo or seconda playing two bass clefs, both hands on the bottom part of the piano.

In the old days, before phonographs and radio, piano duets were often the only way people could hear the latest orchestral or chamber music works when they lived far away from cities which had orchestras (almost everybody had a piano and many people could play a little.) Four hands would split the parts of the instruments between them. Even Brahms, during whose lifetime recording was invented, provided four-hands versions of some of his works.

In the 19^th Century days, a courting couple might be left unchaperoned if the lady’s female companion could hear the piano from her post outside the salon door. A few three-hand piano pieces date from this time.

Scrambling the clef signs produces a different kind of recreation for the player with no discernible difference in the sound. Chopin, Schumann and others would sometimes write a bass clef note higher than the treble note played at the same time. The effect is that the player’s thumbs cross, a kind of “Hello” from the composer, since the listener can’t tell from the sound that this is happening.

Mozart at least once wrote duets so that one player was still holding a key down when the other player landed on it. Mozart’s duets were probably played with his sister Nannerl, so he managed in this way to give her finger a good poke.

Other composers including Schubert and Brahms arrange the clefs so that the duet player’s arms cross. Great examples of this are the last part of Schubert’s piano duet piece called “Our Friendship Never Changes” (“Notre amitie est invariable”) and the fourth Brahms Hungarian Dance which John and I are playing in the video.

Duet references: Cameron McGraw, Piano Duet Repertoire, Indiana University Press. Ernest Lubin, The Piano Duet, Grossman.

Tears and Moonlight

When I first encountered Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 27, No. 2, quasi una Fantasia—famously known as the “Moonlight”—I was heartened by the fact that I could play the first few bars and that they sounded like something. Never mind that the beginning of the Adagio sostenuto is just a single repeated broken chord; I was a teenager and sincerely wanted to express drama, misery, mystery. Not to mention seeming to be a better piano player than I really was.

Mrs. Pack, my teacher, coolly informed me that the sonata had three movements and that I might want to get acquainted with the other two. Undaunted, I practiced the Adagio—the easy movement--for hours (or at least half-hours) on end and achieved my goal when I played it for my friend Audrey and she cried.

Since that time, I have probably taught the slow movement of the “Moonlight” several hundred times, the middle movement two or three times, and the third movement not even once. “Try to remember that it is their first encounter with this music,” Mr. Sheldon reminded me when I complained about always having to teach Beethoven’s “Für Elise”, Mozart’s C Major, the “Moonlight” and Debussy’s Clair de Lune. “Remember how you felt when you first heard it.”

There is power in the Adagio of Beethoven’s Op. 27, No. 2. How else can I explain the lengths to which some students will go to try to play it? One student, barely in Level Two, taught himself the first page using diagrams of the keyboard with the hands drawn in.

Terry, whom I encountered at the grocery store yesterday, lettered every single note of the Adagio and triumphantly played the last chord after three months of diligent practice. He refused, however, to play it in the annual student recital. The piece was already on the printed program, so I announced that I would play it in Terry’s place.

As I played, I noticed stirring and tittering from the audience at the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, the seaside concert hall where we used to hold our recitals. I was well into the Adagio when I saw the reason.

Terry’s wife, Cynthia, had cut out a cardboard moon and, using a rod and reel, was lowering the moon on a line from the balcony until it swung right over the big Steinway.