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The music on the stand in front of me is illuminated, and I fall in love with the light, the alto clef curlicuing around the cloudy patterns from Papa's pipe.

When I started to play viola, I learned to read alto clef, which has middle C smack dab in the middle of the staff, and eventually I was the music-reading equivalent of trilingual.

The viola's song is in a language no one knows; it reads from the alto clef, not the treble.

Tenor clef, which is like alto clef but with the C one line higher, flummoxed me entirely.