We just had our December 2025 Symphony of the Verdugos concert yesterday as I write this, and one of the pieces we performed this time got me thinking about something I’ve noticed over the years but hadn’t really put into words until now.

We performed Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso RV 576 (for oboe and violin), and the most interesting thing about the section violin and viola parts in that piece was that parts of them were written in bass clef. If you know about violin and viola, you know that they are not traditionally written in bass clef, but treble clef for the violin, and alto clef or treble clef for the viola. If you play certain other instruments or have had college level music training, then you should also be able to read bass clef, but as a violinist or violist I have not generally been asked to play from bass clef parts. 

I have actually done that twice in the past year, including around last Christmas when I played viola for a choir concert at Pierce College and was asked to read the tenor line from a traditional hymnal setting of Christmas carols. Tenor parts in those settings are in the bass clef, so we had to read bass clef viola then too.

I was able to handle it both times without too much trouble, but it definitely twists your brain in an interesting way. I have played piano for most of my life from when I was about 6, so I’ve known how to read bass clef for a long time, but the point I want to come to here is that however good you are at reading music in the abstract, your ability to play from sheet music on any given instrument is partly kinesthetic, and linked to that instrument. I’ve discussed this idea a bit in some of my other reflection posts, that even aspects of music that don’t seem to be related to physically playing music are learned in part through the physical feeling of touching your instrument(s), or the feeling of the muscles in your body as you sing. I mentioned this in relation to aural skills as developed in Musicianship classes when I was tutoring those at CSUN while I worked on my master’s degree over the past couple of years.

I found the same thing to be true as I tried playing bass clef viola on this Vivaldi piece over the past few weeks. Even though I can read bass clef just fine on paper when I’m not playing an instrument, or I can read it just fine while playing piano, my brain expects to read alto clef while I’m holding my viola, and links the physical placement of the pitches on the instrument to the relative position of notes on the staff while I’m playing the instrument. My first real instrument as a kid was violin, and I eventually learned to read treble clef violin parts after starting with playing by ear with the Suzuki method. The biggest initial challenge I had when I first switched to viola in my last semester at Berklee College of Music was learning to really read alto clef. It took about a month of weekly rehearsals and practice time to get comfortable with that once I started trying to play viola in an ensemble (immersion is often the best way to learn something!), and I noticed immediately that even though I’d gotten quite comfortable with treble clef on violin over about 15 years of working on it, treble clef for viola messed with my mind because the notes are not quite in the same place on the viola compared to the violin. I have gotten pretty comfortable with both standard viola clefs over the decade-plus that I’ve been playing viola regularly, but throwing in another clef, even one I’m as familiar with as bass clef, has once again messed with my mind. The notes were not difficult in the Vivaldi piece (or the Christmas carols, for that matter), and I was able to learn them well enough that I wasn’t really reading by the concert anyway, but it did shine another light on how much kinesthetics plays a role in even the more abstract parts of learning music, and not just the obvious parts of learning to physically manipulate the instrument with your body to play it.

A similar phenomenon shows up in a couple of woodwind instruments I play, namely the recorder and the tin whistle. Orchestral wind instruments generally transpose when multiple instruments from the same family are used, such that the written pitch goes with the fingering on the instrument. It’s the composer or orchestrator’s job to make sure that the written pitch will produce the correct sounding pitch based on the transposition of the instrument in question, something that drives composition students nuts while they are learning that in high school or college (you need to understand transposition for score reading and analysis even if the notation software often takes care of actually doing the transposing when you write. You also need to understand what it's doing so you can verify that it's correct and even just know what to tell it to do in the first place). But transposing makes the players’ lives much simpler, because they can double within the family without having to learn different fingerings for each instrument for the same written part.

Cue the recorder and whistle - these instruments don’t transpose, even while they have large families, and so as someone who plays them, I have to remember which instrument I’m playing to make sure I’m playing the right sounding note as printed in the music. I don’t know if there is any movement to make recorders transpose - they’ve been around as non-transposed instruments for hundreds of years, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for that to happen. Grey Larsen, author of The Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistle does advocate for transposing whistles, and has a demonstration of that phenomenon in both that book and 150 Gems of Irish Music for Tin Whistle. I stand by his system, though since most of the time whistle players don’t play from specially prepared tin whistle sheet music, we don’t generally get to take advantage of this function. Usually if I’m learning a tune from a tunebook, it’s the same tunebook as all the other Celtic instruments are using, and if I need to use a C whistle or A whistle I will be responsible for playing the right pitches. See the end of this post for a tip regarding reading in unfamiliar situations like this.

I did have one situation that came up in June this year where I did use transposed whistle music. Actually it was at the end-of-Spring concert for that same choir that I was playing bass clef viola last winter (that group has been a good one for me to practice my musicianship skills - on that same Spring concert I also had a chance to improvise a viola harmony part from more or less a lead sheet). We played some music by the conductor where he’d written an Irish-style jig he wanted on either flute or whistle. He asked me to play the whistle part, and it was in D dorian (see my Modes guide for more about Dorian mode). The standard whistle is in D major (Ionian) and the related modes, so I had to use a ‘C’ whistle to play in D dorian most effectively. It was only a couple of lines of music and the tune was a pretty standard kind of jig, so I probably wouldn’t have had trouble reading it at pitch on the C whistle. But I know that the adrenalin rush of playing a solo line in a concert can mess with even the sharpest musical minds 😉, so to reduce my mental load, I put the line in my notation software in E dorian, which is the most common dorian mode used on a ‘D’ whistle. This allowed me to read my standard E dorian fingerings from the D whistle but on the C whistle, so it sounded in D dorian and came out correctly. If all that sounds very confusing in text, just know that if you play it, it is actually much easier, and now maybe you also understand why learning transposition drives students crazy!

Now for my sight-reading tip I promised earlier:

Learning to read intervallically can be very helpful, especially once you have a decent understanding of intervals in theory terms, and intervals on your instruments. I mention in many places in my writing the idea of learning music as patterns, not notes, and this is one version of that for notation.

The way it works is this: if you start with a note that you know, then see the next note is in the line or space immediately above the one you were on (space -> line, or line -> space), then that’s a second of some kind (like a scale, though it may or may not really be a scale). Line to line or space to space is a third, line to line but skipping a line between them is a fifth (same for spaces), etc. You can work out all the intervals this way, and then you find yourself reading patterns, not notes. You should ideally be able to tell what pitch you are reading as well, but this trick can be very helpful either while you are first learning to read an unfamiliar clef, or if you find yourself thrown into the deep end with an unexpected request like reading bass clef viola. It is also the way I read non-transposed recorder or whistle parts not written for the ‘D’ whistle (or soprano/tenor recorder - I learned soprano in school, so it's the ‘F’-based sopranino or alto that throw me there).

As a viola player, I’ve gotten good at sight-reading alto clef over the years, but I certainly didn’t start that way. When I was first learning to compose in jr. high and high school before I started playing viola, I had to calculate notes for all the ‘C’ clef instruments - viola with alto clef, or any of the instruments that use tenor clef, which is one line up from alto clef (for alto clef, middle line is middle C and then count from there). I was equally bad at reading either of those clefs back then, but as I’ve gotten better at alto clef, tenor clef now breaks my brain in a much more specific way than it used to, being off from “my” clef by just a line. When one of my tutoring students brought me a tenor clef dictation assignment from their Musicianship class at CSUN, I internally freaked out for a second (“wait, you want me to do dictation in tenor clef now!?” 🙂), but as we tried it together I quickly realized that this was a perfect chance to use intervallic thinking, hearing intervals and notating them purely from that perspective rather than worrying about whether I was hearing/writing a C or a D. They gave us the starting pitch, and then I heard (e.g.) a major third lower, and wrote the note that was the line or space below the line or space my previous note was on. Using those tricks, I was able to get the whole exercise in the allotted number of listens in the software with only a little more trouble than I would have had with any other clef.

Of course, this trick does rely on a good sense of how intervals are physically laid out on your instrument if you are playing this way (back to kinesthetics and reading music), or a strong ability to hear intervals for something like dictation. But as I’ve mentioned before, all of those aspects should ultimately come together to reinforce each other and make you a much stronger musician down the road!

Initial Posting: December 8, 2025