The Second Most Damaging Sentence in Learning Music

Well that got your attention, yes?

To get it off the table, let me state that the most damaging sentence in studying music is “You can’t sing!”—particularly when slung at a child. Elsewhere I have written about this incorrect assertion (all people can sing: if they can speak, they can sing).

Today, though, let us consider words significantly less damaging, but still able to wreak their havoc, namely the ditty “Every Good Boy Does Fine.”

Devised who knows how long ago, this seemingly innocuous sentence is intended to be a mnemonic device for correctly labeling the five lines of the musical staff holding the pitches above Middle C. Those five lines would begin with a symbol usually called the “treble clef” and holds the notes played by the right hand at the piano and by high-register instruments like the flute, clarinet, oboe, and violin, as well as the notes sung by soprano, alto, and tenor voices.

If you learned this little sentence as a child and survived it, then bully for you. But for hordes of adults looking back on their experiences with childhood music lessons, this sentence lingers as one reason for their failure to read music. In fact, you could say it encapsulates their failures.

I am not making this up. So many times in conversations, adults have said to me, “Well, I never learned to read music. I just couldn’t get past that ‘Every Good Boy Does Fine’ thing.”

What is wrong with this memory device, you ask, particularly since it is accurate? Yes, when the musical staff is marked by that curvy “treble clef,” then those five lines indeed will be the right spots for writing the notes e, g, b, d, f.

But accuracy is not at issue. A child needs to learn how the graphing of musical notes on staff lines actually works. Children who focus on this sentence and try to make its words “belong” to individual lines will miss the way the notational system operates.

Back to that treble clef. It is better called a G-Clef and, in fact, serves as symbol to mark the line on which the specific note of “G” will be placed. And not just any G, but the G that lies five notes above the pitch we call Middle C. Once that axis for G is established, then all of the other notes, higher or lower, can be graphed in relation to it.

For a clef is like an axis point in an X-Y graph. In fact, the very word clef comes from the Latin for key (clavis). A clef serves to create an absolute point of reference.

A second clef, usually introduced to children after the G clef, is called the F Clef. It goes popularly name by of “bass clef” and anchors a lower pitch: the F that lies five notes below Middle C. In fact, it looks a bit like a cursive F.

Put together, two musical staffs (staves), each with five lines, the bottom one beginning with an F–Clef and the top one with a G-Clef, create something we call a Grand Staff. The Grand Staff provides an extensive graph that, with the help of a few little lines and symbols, can accommodate virtually all of the notes we find on the piano keyboard.

Isn’t that marvelous? The most complicated work of piano music a person can think up, such as a Chopin, Liszt, or Rachmaninov étude, is graphed using a total of ten lines and two points of axis. 

And that’s what a child needs to understand. For children, then, the mental energy required to recall, play, transfer, and retransfer the words of a ditty would be better spent trusting the mathematical certainty of an axis on a graph.

Best of all there is one more clef: the C-Clef. For centuries it was the most commonly used clef in our Western tradition (particularly in vocal music) and still is required for instruments like the viola and the trombone. It works fabulously when the notes lie around Middle C. Quite frankly, it is the first clef I like to teach to adults or students of upper-elementary age or older. Let us grasp the system first, and then make applications, I like to say.

Unlike the G and F clefs, which are typically fixed, the C clef can move. And boy does it move! It can be placed on any line of the staff. Wherever it is placed, the note pierced by the line that runs through its indented part will be Middle C. So the C-Clef, and Middle C with it, can slide up or down the five lines of the staff.

I have found that adults burdened with a lifetime of thinking that they cannot read music are instantly liberated by seeing what clefs actually do, especially the C-Clef. Their responses go something like this: “You’re kidding!?” “Why didn’t my teacher tell me that” (of course, the teacher possibly did). And most importantly of all: “This makes perfect sense!” Such a revelation does not mean that the newly liberated person will race back into piano lessons or join a community choir. But it might mean that.

More importantly, the stigma from years of thinking that he or she, despite advanced degrees, raising and educating a family, or running a company, was somehow unable to read music simply falls away. And that fact, to me, is a great victory.

A child’s early experience with reading music, particularly when it engenders a sense of inadequacy or incompetency, does not always brush away over time. I need to remember this too when working with children and try to redouble my efforts to make sure things are presented in a logical and accurate way. All of us who teach want to be on the lookout for eyes that flutter or dull over, and glances that turn away in an effort to hide confusion or frustration. Because these are the very things that get buried deep in a child’s heart forever.

Every good boy does fine, and girls too, when music notation is presented as the simple, elegant, and logical system that it is, and not as a memory exercise that has little bearing on the music itself.