Surprising Reason Why Treble and Bass Clef Signs are Different

March 22, 2021 Leslie Young

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Why in the world do the treble and bass clef signs look as they do? They’ve been compared to question marks and elephant ears – but Is there any reason they look the way they do?

In the December 21 blog, The Surprising Reason the Treble and Bass have Different Staff Letters, I touched on the shapes of the treble and bass clef signs. Here’s a little more to the story:

The Treble Clef Sign’s History

For our purposes now, we’ll say the treble clef sign indicates to play with the right hand. The sign curls around the second line, which is G, and that’s why the treble clef is sometimes called the G clef. However, the modern treble clef sign we use today is not anything like its original version.

The Smithsonian has images of the evolution of how the treble clef was drawn. You can see the different stages of the sign and how they each resemble the letter “G” in some way.

This source shows different stages representations of the treble clef sign throughout the ages:

The Bass Clef Sign’s History

The bass clef sign indicates to play with the left hand. The sign curls around the fourth line, which is F, and that’s why the bass clef is sometimes called the F clef. The modern bass clef sign also has an evolutionary past. I imagine the two heavy dots were added to make the F line stand out more, one dot above this fourth line and one dot underneath it. There was a point where the sign was written more like a backwards F (like a cursive F is drawn today)

Bass clef sign’s evolution:

It’s quite interesting to see on this site how composers back to the 1600s would notate their compositions and draw personalized versions of treble and bass clef signs.

As we look backward over the history of music, it seems very nonsensical that there were objections from the church to E flats, A flats, and C sharps. Musicians got around the problem by the use of clefs to reposition notes to be sung as the composer wanted, but written in an acceptable form for the “politics” of the day. For details, read in the interesting 1918 account, A History of Music by Charles Stanford and Cecil Forsyth.

The modern version of treble and bass clef signs in music notation is another example of how things have changed over time. What looks “normal” to us today had very different-looking beginnings in the past!

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