Hm. I’ve seen Bob Mould live countless times, and he uses a capo often, especially (only?) during the acoustic portions of his set. Is it something that would lend itself more to playing rock songs on an acoustic instrument for some reason, or is he just being lazy by using a capo? FTR, I have only the vaguest idea of what a capo does.
If you took each string individually, it does have a fundimental pitch, but an A on a guitar is an A on a piano and a Concert A, so no, stringed instruments are not transposing ones, unless you use a capo.
Or you could tune a guitar say, up 1 step if you wished. Then if you used the same fingerings as normal, on the same frets, it would sound a step higher (pressing on the fingerboard where you normally did for a C would produce a concert D).
(Caveat: since many guitar fingerings use some open strings, you would have to compensate for this if you retuned the guitar before playing chords. A capo would get around this problem.)
Only fretted and flat-fingerboard instruments can use a capo. However, other instruments can be retuned - a movement in Mahler 4 uses a solo violin tuned up a tone, which produces a particularly bright, strident sound. The notation for these passages is a tone below concert pitch, so the relationship between written notes and fingers is maintained.
Did you read my previous posts?
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I think (and someone can correct me if I’m wrong) it has to do with what keys an instrument originally could play the most easily. Before valves and such, instruments had natural tones and harmonics that were easier to play than others, based on the length of the instrument, and other factors.
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Yes.
In fact, some WERE impossible. French horns originally had to change tubing to play some notes, as they were limited by a single overtone series. The invention of valves eliminated the need for a pile of tube extensions.
Sort of, but read on…
Not really. It’s true that some key linkages were added or modified to make some notes and scales easier to play, but the fundimental harmonic structure of the instruments hasn’t changed, and the need for transposing instruments hasn’t either. Did you read what I wrote about the saxes?
Although I will concede that some keys (I think you mean scales) are easier to play than others, no instrument maker sat down, played all scales, and decided to name the instrument after the easiest one. It is an acoustic property native to the design and construction of the instrument.
I’m sure Mr Sax said, “I’m going to build a Eb instrument. For that to happen, I will need a conical tube of X length, width and shape, and I calculate the openings will have to go here and here and here…” He didn’t build it first and name it later.
It is now. We can ask this question in hindsight and say, gee, why wasn’t this all standardized a long time ago?
Time for the wayback machine and to mention some things from the history of music that may have had a contributing effect. None of these are directly responsible for transposing instruments, but it’ll give you an idea what musical instrument makers were thinking.
The idea that 440 Hz = concert A is relatively recent. It was established as international standard for Western music in 1939. Prior to that, A was 435 Hz. Prior to that, A was anywhere from 400 Hz to 450 Hz based on the tuning fork that the performance hall happened to have(Cite.) To make matters worse, because there was no electronic sound reproduction to enhance the sound of an instrument, one of the easiest ways to make an instrument sound brighter and livelier — and thus louder — was to raise its pitch slightly.
When your pipe organ went out of tune, and the top of the pipe was cracked or frayed, what did you do? Slice a bit off the top of all the pipes, that’s what. This would serve to raise the instrument’s pitch each time you “tuned” it.
By the time anybody had measuring devices fine enough for that kind of accuracy, or was committed to deciding on a standard, we already had dozens of instruments being made to very specific pitch ranges.
Now the pitch of a stringed instrument, like cello or guitar, depends on the length of the string and can be tuned by twisting the key on the instrument’s neck. Not so with brass: there the pitch is set by the interior volume of the instrument. It can be fine-tuned by adjusting the mouthpiece, lengthening or shortening the interior of the tube slightly, but it cannot be easily tuned up or down great distances. If you played trumpet, and went to a different city where you had a different pitch range, you’d need a different instrument that could be more finely tuned to that range.
A moment’s thought will serve to show why you can’t make a miniature tuba: by shrinking the interior volume of the instrument’s tubing, you raise the pitch.
So there are half a dozen different kinds of saxophones, not because we like the painful redundancies and mental gymnastics of transposition, but because you can’t make a tenor sax the size of a clarinet by using brass and leather. The physics of sound is in the way.
Also, back in the day, you couldn’t have a flat on every note. The flat symbol is shaped like a B, because that used to be the only note you could make flat. The twelve-tone chromatic scale wasn’t popular at the time because it produced some dissonant intervals (such as a diminished fifth) that people thought was diabolus in musica (“the devil in music”) and the interval was avoided in composition. Though we’re accustomed to instruments today that have the full range of twelve-tone polyphony, producing every note (C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B) it wasn’t always so.
Now throw in even temperament. The way instruments are tuned today, C# and Db are equivalent —enharmonic, we’d say. That wasn’t always so either. Once upon a time, they were unique notes — and that meant if you wanted to play in A, it had an entirely unique tuning.
That’s why the instruments have different sounds: the limitations of sound and size, and a long-standing tradition of non-standardized concert pitch. But why do we call the notes by different names when clearly we mean a certain arbitrary frequency?
Saxophones are all fingered more or less the same way, and read on the same lines of sheet music. This reduces the burden on the bag of wind who’s blowing the horn, and increases the burden on the bag of wind who wrote the music. 
I presume the popularity of transposing instruments came from the painful reality that the average person wasn’t taking music classes daily in school, and multi-instrument virtuosos were hard to come by. It was probably deemed simpler to have one fingering and one staff notation for all saxophones and make the composer — who was usually wealthier and better-educated — do the heavy lifting.
Nowadays, where you can find decent musicians in any elementary school, and where pitches have been standardized, it makes much less sense.
Is this a 100% accurate reason why we have transposing instruments? I doubt it; I’m no music scholar. I fully expect someone to come along with corrections or refinements. It might give you the background to understand how we got to this point, though.
raises hand from the back of the room
I’m a mezzo-soprano who can get into the soprano range if I need, but I’ve never been able to (or ever heard of anyone who can) hold a note high enough to break a wineglass. What’s the deal behind this?
Tho it is by no means crystal clear to me, I think I am beginning to see a glimmer of light.
This nugget seems to have made some headway through my thick skull. I guess my kids have an advantage over me, as they all play wind instruments. I know my harps are in different keys, but that makes sense to me because they each play 20 notes - they just start at a different point on the scale.
Strikes me as goofy that for ease of notation, they messed with the meaning of what strikes me as a pretty basic, objective term. Thinking of piano, if I’m playing 2 octaves up, the notes can either be notated up above the clef, or else they use that “8va” notation. Seems to me they could do something similar for winds. But, as I said, I don’t play winds (other than my ignorant harp noodling). So what wind players apparently accept as a workable system, seems odd to me as an outsider.
My eldest is a music ed freshman in college (flute and piano). She’s taking all kinds of music theory and aural skills courses. And my youngest - the bassoonist - is thinking of going the same route. She’s pretty talented on her axe, but just started piano. It is so funny, because our instructor is pretty rigorous in teaching theory up front. After her first lesson she said “I never knew chords had names!” But she’s diligently working through her pentachords. They are still at the points of their careers where they have learned more than they are able to explain to someone who does not share their vocabulary and experiences.
Damn, Fish. A hell of a post there while I was typing my latest blather. Thanks so much to all of you for sticking with me on this. Definitely got my $14.95 worth today!
(Gonna print this all out and read it over a few more times.)
Not true - the symbol goes much further back than any consistent or common use of letter names for specific notes.
Avoid using saxophones as an example for the history of transposing instruments - their transposing system is directly modelled on the clarinet family.
I keep on repeating ‘accident of history’, and I mean it. To make a sweeping generalisation, the further back you go, the less important the concept of transposition becomes. Music could be written in any ‘key’ without this corresponding directly to any specific (or vague) pitch.
Yes, different instruments have particular features which might not seem obvious to non-players. I can’t stand any violin notation which uses 8va, no matter how high it goes - I’d rather be up on 6 or 7 ledger lines, and have the visual representation of pitch relationships between notes preserved.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
I’ll throw a new angle on the “why are some instruments not concert-pitched” question. Since there are A clarinets, Bb clarinets, and no reason why a C clarinet couldn’t be made (I dunno, maybe it has), you might wonder why we are stuck with mostly Bb’s (for bands) and A’s (for orchestras). Believe it or not, there are reputable musicians who claim that those instruments sound either better or more like the composer’s original intent, and should never be changed.
There are those who claim that vinyl records sound better than CDs, too, and a Strad sounds better than other violins, so we are entering the realm of dubious subjectivity. Nevertheless, if things have been that way for a long time, they tend to remain that way for a longer time.
And I feel just the opposite. I find it harder to read thru a forest of ledger lines but easy to transpose an octave. And unless the music switches back and forth from ledgers to 8vas (a bad notation practice), the relationship is preserved just fine. However, I am approaching it (usually) from a keyboard perspective; YMMV.
Clarinets, oboes, etc., evolved over time and from different makers, but Saxes were designed as a transposing family. I think the accidental vs. deliberate is an interesting and useful factor to consider.
There’s even one more factor about reeds in general. Anyone who learns the fingering for an oboe, sax, clarinet or flute will find considerable similarity in fingerings for the other instruments in the woodwind group (as compared with trumpets or trombones, say). This strengthens the reason why fingerings shouldn’t change to play a written “C” – only the copyist knows for sure.
Yes, it has. But nobody’s had a reason to use it, and even in an educational situation the fact remains that existing music presents clarinet parts in the transposed form.
I didn’t make my point clearly - at the piano, I’d far prefer 8va to a forest of telegraph poles. But not on the violin.
Capos are clamps which basically close all the strings at a particular fret. If you put the capo on the third fret, for instance, then you’re bumping the “open” strings up a step and a half. This allows the guitarist to play open chords (chords which employ “open,” or unfretted strings) in a higher key. Open chords tend to be easier to play than entirely closed (o 'barred") chords, but sometimes they just employ particular voicings or wide fret spacings which can’t really be played away from the nut without a capo. Usually capos are used with accoustic guitars and usually they’re used so that a guitarists can play in a key more suited to his/her vocal range while keeping the easier fingerings or preferred chord voicings.
Capos are less common in rock because it tends to use simpler chords (oftentimes just two-note “power chords”) and more complex or nuanced voicings (like diminished chords or major 7ths) tend to get buried or sound overly dissonant with distortion. It’s not a subtle genre.
I’m not contradicting you. You say “accident of history,” but you don’t say what that history is. I’m not trying to pin it on one single cause, but I understand the broad strokes of how music, our instruments, and our notation has evolved over time. I am home on my lunch break looking up the source of the “flat symbol derived from b rotundum” but I won’t have time to finish looking up a cite on it… gotta head back to work.
Anyway, I think what Dinsy is struggling with is that what looks today like a rational an orderly system of even-tempered notes evolved out of hundreds of years of people making shit up as they went along. If we’d invented music today it probably would be a lot more organized.
The history is of lots of instruments which had all sorts of different intontation and transposition systems. This gradually reduced to a situation where some families are in concert pitch (keyboards, strings, double reeds), some have a rational system based around B flat transpositions (single reeds), some are just weird and I’m glad nobody’s asked about them (French Horns).
It’s difficult to explain that this isn’t a problematic situation without coming across as condescending. The more familiar you are with music in general, and with classical ensembles in particular, the more familiar you become with transposing instruments, to the point that it’s second nature to think in ways which accomodate them.
Agreed. And it’d be a lot less interesting, too.
Minor correction :
Shortest - pressing a valve on a trumpet will lengthen the pipe.
On a brass instrument, the lengthening corresponds to 1/2 step, 1 step, or 1 1/2 step for valves 2, 1, and 3 respectively. Each unique combination also corresponds to one of the seven positions on a trombone.
To further confuse the whole key of an instrument thing, French Horns are often ‘double horns’. They have a duplicate set of valve pipes to make it play as an F or Bb instrument. A fourth valve (“trigger valve”) selects between the instrument’s key. Nevertheless, (modern) written music is always for the instrument in F. In this case it is not the fingerings that transfer — a different set of fingerings must be used when in Bb.
As to why double horns exist, they make it easier to play higher notes. Horns have a very long length and thus a rather low fundamental relative to their usual playing range. This requires a tighter mouth vibration to produce the high overtones needed. By changing it to a (higher-pitched) Bb instrument, the overtones aren’t as high and it can be easier to play. See musicat’s previous link on overtones to help explain this.
I just looked up some tablature for one of Mould’s songs, and it seems there are some major 7ths (and maybe diminished chords, I don’t know). These are the chords listed (although, as I said, it was a tab site; still, they listed the chords, though I don’t know if the stuff in the parentheses applies to the chords or the tabs). Anyway, I’m going to list the chords here, because I have another question: this seems like a lot of chords for what is basically a rock song. Is this uncommon, or is it really not that “advanced”? What do the “add 15” etc. directions mean? This thread (and Fish’s link) are teaching me a lot, so I apologize for all the questions - I’m just a little excited to be understanding some of it. Anyway, here are the chords:
Em/G6/Asus2/B7sus4/F#7(add15)/A(add9)/Dsus2(6)/C#m7/D#(add15)
Are these the actual chords according to pitch or just the forms played above the capo? I could probably help you more if I could see the actual voicings.
A lot of these fingerings aren’t really as complicated as their names make them sound. The use of open strings allows you to incorporate some notes that make for longer chord names but can still be simple to form.
The “add [insert number here]” notations are basically telling you to add that particular note on the scale. If the note to be added is higher than 7, it means to add the note where it would appear in the next octave. For instance a C add11 would be a C chord played with the addition of the eleventh note in two octave scale. The C major scale is CDEFGAB, so continuing into the next octave, the 11th note would be F (played an octave higher than the 4th).
An add15 strikes me as kind of an unusual notation because a 15th is the tonic, but it’s a tonic played two octaves higher than the root, so I guess it needs to be notated if it needs to be played.
“add15” and “add9” (and similar constructions) mean to add the 15th or the 9th of the chord to the fingering you’re playing. For instance, an A(add9) would be a-c#-e and then b an octave above the chord.