Transposing instruments

Factual Questions
1

After all these years, including several close associations with school and youth orchestras, I still don’t really get transposing instruments. To be more precise –

  1. I understand what transposing means. It means that the note as named is not the same note as understood according to concert pitch. In other words, a B-flat instrument, when playing a B-flat, actually plays a C according to concert pitch.

  2. I understand that different instruments might have different “natural homes,” such as the natural open note or the key played using the most simple fingering.

  3. I understand that one might want to modify a staff (stave) so that use of ledger lines is minimized. To that effect, I understand why a guitar, for example, transposes one octave down.

However, except for this case, I don’t understand why you would want to call a B-flat (played by a trumpet, for example) a C – doesn’t that create extra mental contortions when a composer wants to write in a particular key?

Why don’t we call a trumpet’s or a clarinet’s B-flat a B-flat and rearrange the staff and the clef, so it can be understood as such?

2

Transposing instruments do indeed cause more work for the composer (or arranger.)

The main reason for transposing instruments is limited range. For example, a piccolo has a very high range. If you were to write all your piccolo music on the treble clef at concert pitch, it would almost all be on ledger lines above the staff. Instead, piccolo music is written an octave lower, so the notes appear mostly on the staff. Since it’s transposed one octave, it’s in the same key as concert pitch, and is less of a PITA.

But some instruments don’t quite fit, and can’t easily be moved an octave up or down. For example, an alto flute is longer than a standard concert flute, hence somewhat lower in pitch. It is pitched a fourth lower, so a C on the staff is actually sounded as a G on the alto flute. So why write it as a C on the staff? Because the same fingering that gives you a C on a regular flute produces a G on an alto flute. This makes it very easy for musicians to switch between instruments in the same “family.” They don’t have to learn new fingerings for each one. Instead, the composer has to write the notes that, when transposed, will equal the correct pitch.

3

Right. It’s much easier for a saxophonist to know that a particular fingering is always a G, whether they’re playing alto, tenor, or whatever. It is a little more work for the composer, but nowadays with Finale or something similar, the transposition can be done automatically so it’s really not a big deal.

4

As to why instruments of a particular pitch are used, it’s probably more out of historical preference than anything else. For example, trumpets developed to be a particular length, which puts them in Bb, and that’s what people are used to hearing and composing for.

Of course, some players do use instruments in a different key than the most common. Granted, the differences are slight, but some simply don’t want to change it too much.

As for composing, with modern software, it’s not tremendously difficult. Theoretically all a composer needs to be aware of is the instruments range in one key © in order to write music, and allow the rest to be taken care of by somebody or something else. Most composers probably have a better awareness then that - since written music is primarily based on what they will hear, no matter how it is written out.

5

Interestingly enough, I had a friend who played the trumpet who had a slide she could slip in to change it from Bb to C. I wish I had had one when I played trumpet and was trying to play with a band.

However, it is apparently a bit harder to blow the higher notes using the C slide.

Si

6

You might say the work is transposed from player to composer.

Or not.

Seriously, families of instruments like saxes have identical fingering for everything from sopranino to bass versions. Their on-paper range is identical. If you play bass sax and know how to finger a G, you can do it on another sax just as well. Obviously, something has to be adjusted, and that is where the composer/arranger/copyist comes in, who transposes what the desired sound is into a note that produces it when played.

The alternative, where a composer only writes concert pitches, would be for a sax player to learn an entirely different fingering and a variety of clefs as well. It would be a nightmare for sax players to cross over.

7

>I had a friend who played the trumpet who had a slide she could slip in

I always wanted to have a piccolo trumpet, which is much shorter in length and plays higher notes easily. There’s a couple of lines played by one in the Beatle’s “Penny Lane”, for example. Some of these are E flat trumpets, but some of them have several slides and can play as three or even four different instruments.

8

I’ve read a few books on musical instruments over the years, but can’t recall any reason being given for transposing instruments. Which may mean the “anomaly” has been accepted for so long that no one knows how we got into this mess. Blame it on the first guy to organize an orchestra.

It should be pointed out that the saxophone family was developed fairly recently (nineteenth century, off the top of my head), long after transposing instruments became entrenched. Transposing instruments being acceptable, the inventor designed all sizes to use the same fingering, something one can do when starting from scratch. Makes life easy for sax players, miserable for composers having to score a bari sax thirteen notes higher than the pitch desired.

9

I admire people that know stuff like this. Take it as a compliment. Way, way back I tried to play a musical instrument and never understood the nuances. Very frustrating. Maybe now that I am older an wiser I could get it, but honestly, that time has passed. I’ll listen and appreciate.

10

I took a couple years of music theory in high school (and I was good at it!) but sadly never learned to play anything. :frowning:

One of these days I’ll have time for piano lessons.

11

It’s probably the brass players’ fault. Trumpets and French horns didn’t used to have valves or pistons; the only way to adjust the pitch was by adjusting the tension in one’s lips to hit different notes in the harmonic series.[sup]1[/sup] This meant, effectively, that a given instrument could only ever play in one key, and so a single player was forced to use different instruments if the composer ever decided to modulate. With the invention of piston valves and rotary valves for instruments, this instrument-swapping became obsolete; but musicians being musicians, they stuck to the way they’d always done it.

The trombone, with its slide allowing for a full chromatic range, didn’t need to engage in such shenanigans. It’s telling that even today, the trombone is not a transposing instrument; while the modern trumpet and French horn generally are.

An interesting illustration of this fact can be found in Hector Berlioz’s <i>Treatise on Instrumentation</i>. He goes on for pages and pages explaining how the various non-valved horns work, and how they’re made different pitches. Then he describes the new-fangled valve horn, and how it seems like a pretty good idea and that it will “doubtless soon be adopted everywhere.” Then, a few pages later, he does basically the same thing with the trumpet. The <i>Treatise</i> is a good read (and not because Berlioz has some really nice things to say about the trombone), and it’s got a lot of information that’s still valid today, but there are places where I find myself mentally assigning Mr. Burns’ voice to his out-of-date, quaint descriptions.

[sup]1[/sup] And, in the case of the horn, the position of the hand in the bell.

12

Keep in mind also that everyone who currently plays a transposing instrument knows a particular set of fingerings, and those fingerings are going to be taught to the next generation of players. To suddenly eliminate the transposition, thus altering the fingerings, would cause pedagogical chaos.

Further, there are millions of scores (full score and parts) out there that would need to be retranscribed, printed, sold, bought, marked, etc. The logistics of eliminating transposition is rather daunting. Easier to simply teach transposition, which is a useful skill anyway.

13

A related question:

One of my son’s vocal coaches (a well-known Broadway music producer) apparently can transpose music on the fly (i.e. he can read music written in one key and play it on piano in another). It seems like this would be an especially difficult skill to master. Is it? And how common is it to have?

14

It’s not that hard, as long as you practice thinking in intervals rather than particular notes. In equal temperament, there’s no particular difference between different keys, except the historical accident of some notes being the white keys on a piano and others the black keys.

If you imagine a keyboard containing only one large row of white keys (twelve per octave) then you can see that transposing would simply require moving your hands to the left or the right.

15

Well, it’s “practicing thinking in intervals” that’s the hard part. It might work for singers or players of single-line instruments, but most piano music just has too many notes to make it a simple or naturally intuitive task. A keyboard composed of a single row of keys wouldn’t be functional for most of the music that’s written for it anyway–in that system, most people wouldn’t be able to reach more than a minor sixth or so, scales would be impossibly awkward, and so on.

On a normal keyboard, transposing is a lot more complex than moving your hands left or right, since you have to think in a new scale and translate any accidentals into their new equivalents. If we’re talking about non-traditionally-tonal music, forget it. That adds a whole new layer of complexity.

A pianist with absolute pitch would face additional problems, since he or she would perceive everything as wrong and subconsciously try to correct it.

Being able to transpose at sight is a great skill to have, and one that a successful accompanist or vocal coach probably will have, but it takes years to develop and many pianists can’t do it functionally at all.

ETA: I’m assuming we’re talking about transposing while sight reading. It would be much easier to transpose something you already knew, of course.

16

My guess is you are not a keyboard player. Except for an octave transposition, it does not work that way for any transposing interval. There is a lack of symmetry within the octave that prevents a simple hand shift. It’s not like putting a capo on a guitar.

Transposing on sight whether from music in memory or on paper is an admirable skill, but it can be learned. Practice makes perfect.

Perhaps this is a nitpick, but you imply that a non-valved instrument can play all the notes of one key, which is not the case. The harmonic series is not the same as a key. All pitches in the scale of any key are not present in the harmonic series; some notes in the harmonic series are slightly out of tune and cannot be used or need to be adjusted by the player; and all pitches in a scale are not adjacent in the lower parts of the harmonic series. There’s a difference. A bugle cannot play a 2 octave western major or minor 7-step or chromatic 12-step scale.

17

That’s why we still study all the different clefs. You can transpose by pretending the music is written in a different clef, adjusts the flats and sharps accordingly, and you’re off. The note on the bottom line of the staff is a ‘G’ in bass clef, an ‘F’ in alto clef, a ‘D’ in tenor clef and an ‘E’ in treble clef. So, to play something that is written in G major down a half step, pretend there are 6 flats instead of 1 sharp. To play down a whole step, pretend the treble clef is a tenor clef and the bass clef is an alto clef, pretend there’s 1 flat instead of 1 sharp and off you go - you’re sight transposing. This may seem complex, but it’s way easier that adjusting by interval. Sight reading at tempo means the music is going past too fast for you to really be thinking about the notes, just like when you read this passage out loud, you’re not thinking about the letters, you’re thinking about words, phrases and sentences.

There are two groups of musicians who have the most impressive sense of sight transposition - accompanists who do a lot of recital repertoire, particularly but not exclusively vocal accompanists (‘Collaborative Pianist’ is the modern, politically correct term, but it grates on my nerves.) and French Horn players. For horn players, it is because of the fact that their parts were written for ‘horn in x’, and the assumption was that they would play a horn in that key, or use a ‘crook’ (someone upthread mentioned a slide to change the key of a trumpet - that’s usually called a ‘crook’) to change the key. When the modern valved instrument started to become standard, Horn players had to be able to transpose at sight from the written part to the key of the piece on a horn in F, which reads two different clefs. A horn player I lived with talked about entire lessons spent sight-transposing Wagner horn parts (and Wagner’s horn writing is nuts - he wrote for the old-fashioned instruments with crooks, but he wrote horn parts that would be all but impossible to play on the older instruments. Wagner horn players are kinda like the people who do simultaneous translation.)

The pianists I know who are good at sight transposition all do it by clef/key signature. It’s an impressive skill, but at the same time, it’s part of the job description for certain musicians.

By the way, acsenray, I’m sorry to tell you you’ve got it the wrong way around. When a trumpet player plays a ‘C’ on a Bb instrument, he’s playing a concert ‘Bb’. When you tell a trumpet player to play a ‘Bb’ on his Bb instrument, it will produce a concert ‘Ab’. The example you cite would work for a trumpet in D - that instrument would indeed produce a concert ‘C’ when asked to play ‘Bb’, but you need to write a ‘D’ for a Bb instrument to play a ‘C’.

I tell my students all the time - musicians are nuts! And if they didn’t start out nuts, music drives them that way.

18

the highland bagpipes are another example of an instrument that is a transposing instrument because of changes in the instrument over time.

music for the pipes is written as if the base note is A, but in practice, most chanters are pitched at Bb or even B natural.

the reason is that the pitch of the chanter has steadily crept up over the past two centuries, largely because in piping competitions, judges tend to favour sharper, brighter performances. players respond by increasing the pitch of their chanters. but there’s no reason to change all the music notation.

19

See what a problem it is? :smiley:

20

Back when I was in school, <mumble> years ago, I was a pretty good clarinetist. In junior high, my band conductor decided he wanted a soprano Eb clarinet in the band, so he handed me one and told me I was it. Now, very few pieces for band actually have a part for an Eb clarinet, so what I usually played were oboe parts (our band having no oboe players). Oboes are written in C. So, I got pretty good at transposing, even while sight reading. Later I found myself in an orchestra playing contrabass clarinet, which is usually written in Bb like an ordinary clarinet (BBb, technically), but the composer of this particular piece had decided he wasn’t going to bother and just wrote the darn part in C. Wouldn’t have been too bad if the conductor didn’t yell at me every time I got a note wrong.

It’s been years since I played, but, if I recall correctly, I did it by figuring out what the proper key signature was, and what interval up or down I needed to adjust the notes from what I saw on the page. Since I spent most of my time doing the C to Eb transposition, that interval was usually a minor third down, so I suppose I essentially learned a new clef.