Dear all - [I accidentally posted this to the wrong list - my apologies to those of you who are seeing it twice!]
I haven't done any research on this (I should!), but my horn teacher in college told me that the pairing of hi-lo horns began when most court orchestras had two horn players, a high (or clarino) specialist, and a low specialist. Whenever more horns were needed, they borrowed another pair from a neighboring court, and another pair of hi-lo horn parts were given to them to play. This may be apocryphal, but it makes sense to me, BTW - sure, all horn players CAN read key signatures, but they may miss a few notes the first time through, while they get used to it. It's mostly a (bad) habit, acquired from reading orchestral parts without them. I would prefer to read parts for horn in E than try to remember all the sharps for B-major (which is what the horn would be in, for a piece in E major), but I LIKE transposing. Wagner used transposition in this way quite often. I also like knowing that whatever note is printed as "C" is usually the tonic - unless it's Brahms, or some other smart cookie who played around with the transposition. (Mr.) Jamin Hoffman 209 Madero Dr. Thiensville, WI 53092 (262) 512-2666 [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
