Why the treble clef?

Readability.

If you look at the range of a staff, it's an octave and a fourth (in treble clef, from D below the bottom line to G above the top line). Add about three ledger lines on either side, and you've got a bit more than three octaves.

So if an instrument has a range of less than three octaves, it's going to use a single clef. By adding 8va and 8va basso, you can extend that to five octaves, which gives you pretty much every instrument except keyboards - instruments ith keyboards or a keyboard layout (like mallet percussion) are the only ones you'll find using the grand staff.

Other instruments use different clefs and/or transposition to put their notes within a single clef. It's assumed that if you're looking at music for a transposing instrument, you probably either play it or you're conducting an ensemble that includes it - which means you've probably studied enough to know what adjustments are needed to put the music in concert pitch.

Another consideration in deciding what clef to use is doubling. If an instrumentalist is expected to double on related instruments, they'll be written exactly the same way - that way, the performer doesn't need to learn a new set of fingerings for every variant. Which means bass clarinet music is written in treble clef, saxophone music is transposed so the note written as C is all closed holes, etc.

NoteBoat, good info but I don't think you've answered Drunk Rock's specific question - Why use the treble clef for guitar, when the tenor clef would do the job just as well and eliminate the octave shift? Way back when standard notation replaced tab as the standard way of notating and publishing guitar music, they chose to use the treble clef (with octave shift), rather than the tenor clef. Any idea why? I can only think it was because the treble and bass clefs were far more familiar than the tenor clef to musicians and music students in general due to the importance of keyboard arrangements and reductions of multi-part scores,etc. Its use in vocal scores for the tenor voice has also been largely dispensed with in favour of the bass clef or octave shifted treble clef. Maybe they got that idea from us. :lol:

DrunkRock, the octave shift shouldn't cause any problems. I never even notice whether or not the little 8 is there. I automatically assume that, if it's guitar music, it's meant to sound an octave lower than written. The only slight problem I've encountered is when inputting the notes of a guitar part to a sequencer using the treble clef and hearing it come out an octave higher than I expected because I'd forgotten to shift it down an octave, like a real guitar does. (not a problem with guitar-specific sequencers like Guitar Pro, which take the octave shift into account.)

I've done a little digging - maybe not enough, but it'll at least let me make an educated guess.

Early staffs were four lines, and ledger lines didn't exist. That gave you a range of a ninth to write your melodies.

A range of a ninth isn't so bad. It's roughly the range of the average singer, and the staff was originally developed for vocal music. But which ninth was a problem - C to D? F to G? A to B? Since the range of a particular voice or instrument might run off the staff, clefs were developed about a thousand years ago. One line was labeled as to what pitch it represented; G, C, and F survive as today's clefs, while a couple of others (D and "Gamma" - a symbol for a clef with two G notes, one on the bottom line, the other in the top space) died off by the 1500s.

These clefs were NOT pitch specific. A bass singer and a soprano singer handling a melody that ran from F to G both used the same clef. Early on, every instrument used every clef - it depened on the range of the melody at hand.

As time went on, the staff expanded to five lines, and after that ledger lines were used... followed by the ottava. With a few ledger lines combined with the ottava and ottava basso, you've got a pretty decent range - three ledger lines above and below a clef, plus the ottavas, gives you a range of just over five octaves. That's more than any instrument could handle until the invention of the piano around 1700 (earlier keyboards, like harpsichords and clavichords, typically had about four octaves).

With the piano, you've got a bigger range, and a single staff is no longer enough. The earliest use of the grand staff I could find dates to the late 1720s - and that's the point where staves become range specific, in relation to a middle C.

Anyway, armed with a rough idea of clef history, I think I can answer the question :)

The guitar's range expanded in the late 1600s - an image I found of a Stradivarius guitar from the 1680s has 5 strings, and 18 frets. In our current tuning, that's E to F- which requires three ledger lines on either side of the treble clef. If you use the tenor clef, which puts C on the second line from the top, you still need three ledger lines below - but you need FOUR lines above. Since the staff wasn't yet tied to a specific octave, it made more sense to use the G clef... and when that became the "treble" clef in the next century, the transposition part occurred after the fact.

Nice bit of research NoteBoat - Cheers.

Very thorough folks, thanks! A nice little bit of trivia I can have now.