I was having a chat with another musician friend of mine today and he was asking me about bass clef, one question I couldn't answer.

WHY does the bass clef begin on low E and where also would a D be placed IF the keyboardist was playing a D major block chord?

The bass clef does not begin on E, unless you define begin as a ledger line beneath the staff. Lines are g-b-d-f-a, spaces are a-c-e-g. Bass clef is also known as the F clef, those 2 dots straddle the note f. It is even technically correct(although almost unheard of in this day and age) to move the clef to a different place on the 5 line staff, if you were to put it around the middle line you would have an F clef with the lines being b-d-f-a-c. Don't ever do this, I mention it only as an archaic curiosity. How this relates to where a piano would put a D leads us to a little wrinkle, music for the string bass or bass guitar is written one octave higher than it sounds. This means that while the C on the first ledger line above the staff means middle C to a pianist, to you it is an octave lower(5th fret on your G string). As to where the D would be placed, there are any number of ways for a pianist to voice a D major. Could start in the middle of the staff, above the first ledger line, below the bottom ledger line, etc.

Certainly there is a musicologist who can answer the question with certainty, but perhaps the bass clef was centered on F in order for middle C below the treble clef to mirror middle C above the bass clef.

That is just a wild guess; you realize we Texans can tell any story with a straight face....

The bass clef doesn't "begin" or "end" anywhere. An infinity of notes can be notated on additional ledger lines. The number of notes are only limited by our capacity to hear and the tonal ranges of our instruments. A "D" would be notated in the space immediately underneath the low E.

There are various different clefs besides the F and G clef. There's also a C clef which is still used for some instruments. A long time ago there were many others which have fallen in relative disuse over the years.

I think the answer OP is looking for is. The definition of the range comes from it being the lower half of the Grand Staff IE the Piano Staff that has 2 Staffs. The C thats the First line above the bass clef and one line below Treble Clef is "Middle C".



Aj