Haven't you ever had to explain to people why Tubas (which are Bb instruments) are named with 2 Bs (BBb) yet trumpets are named with 1 B (Bb) and why it appears there is only one octave between them, as normally printed yet there are really 2 octaves and trumpets should be printed bb instead of Bb? Which is easier to say: "double-b-flat" or "b-flat-1?" Yes, "e-flat-2" may be harder than "capital-e-flat" but nobody every says "capital-e-flat," they just say "e-flat" so the proper Helmholtz nomenclature doesn't make its way into speech anymore than the midi nomenclature does when labeling instruments.
I had to think about this for a while. I still do. I think your assumption is that instruments should be (or are) labeled wilth an octave designation. But they aren't. And if they were, which octave would you want to label them with? A Bb trumpet's fundamental is actually Bb (Bb2) or Great Bb, just as a BBb tuba's fundamental is BBBb (Bb0) or subcontra Bb. So whatever you pick is arbitrary and capricious.
As always, expecting consistency of human beings (and especially of musicians!) tends to be a losing proposition. I suspect that the BBb designation for a "normal" tuba was adopted simply because it designates it as sounding an octave lower than the Bb tenor tuba (or euphonium). And I suspect that the BBb designation did NOT come out of organ terminology or Helmholtz notation for the octaves. (And of course current practice is to omit the key of the instrument anyway, at least in the band world: We know that Alto Sax is in Eb, Trumpet is in Bb, and Tuba is in Bb, so the pitch is not needed to identify them.)
As to other instruments in the bass range, I routinely lable my contra-alto clarinet parts EEb, and my contrabass clarinet parts BBb. Just my own practice, not based on any style book. And I would probably label a bass sax part BBb as well, except that our band's bass sax player prefers to read from bass clef, concert pitch (i.e. tuba parts).
When people see the tuba designation of Eb printed, they don't think "Ah, the octave below the bass-clef-second-space-C. They figure it's just a printing convention.
Yes, we are talking about printing conventions. Which by definition are perfectly free to be illogical! Does "Eb trumpet" mean a trumpet a 4th above the stardard trumpet, or one a 5th below? The answer is, it depends. Depends on the composer, time period, musical style, etc. Same "translation" problems with horn in bass clef, bass clarinet in bass clef, cello in treble clef. They are printing conventions, and they aren't consistent.
I think it really is a broken system, and it does need fixing, unless it's alright to maintain two distinct sorts of classification: one for musical theorists and one for working musicians.
Why not? We've had similar things around for years! A theorist's i iv v designations are a tool for analysis; a working musician's Bb Eb F designations are a tool for performing. (And that ignores the existence of "Nashville notation," based on music theory 101 but not the same.) In fact, you can go back to the 9th century for a striking example. The musical examples in the "Musica enchiriadis" of the mid-9th century were in a bastardized pseudo-Greek notation that had the singular advantage of designating EXACTLY which pitches were intended. That's why we can understand the examples of early organum in that treatise and know exactly what they sounded like. But working musicians never adopted that notation, instead muddling along with unheightened neumes and then heightened neumes and other fairly bizzare pitch indicators until Guido d'Arezzo finally pulled a lot of existing ideas together in the early 11th century and gave us the first solid pitch notation that caught on (but not immediately and not everywhere).
But as someone else posted, it matters which you learned first and use the most. So I guess we are really stuck with two different labeling conventions, and the most versatile among us will teach and use both systems and teach and use the conversions between them.
My wife was in school with a pair of boys from a bilingual family, and the parents wanted the boys to grow up native in both English and French. The trick they adopted was that "upstairs we speak French and downstairs we speak English." Voila!! Children can learn anything! And my wife is Kodaly-trained and uses moveable do in her teaching, but understands fixed do and can translate for students from Israel, South American, and other fixed do places including Quebec.
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
