At 4:01 PM -0400 9/16/11, Raymond Horton wrote: >On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 2:17 PM, John Howell <[email protected]> wrote: >> familiar with Piston. But of course any >> first-semester orchestration course has to spend >> hours on the ranges and transpositions, while in >> my Vocal-Choral Arranging class I have the >> students actually ARRANGING short exercises from >> day one. > >I am still appalled at people in music at advanced stages (including >one conductor at a very advanced stage) who think that tuba sounds an >octave lower than written. It IS a bit confusing for orchestration >beginners, since contrabassoon and doublebass (the corresponding >contrabass instruments in woodwinds and strings) both sound 8ba, but >no one ever said life would be consistent.
I haven't run into that, but I'm equally appalled at the otherwise good composers or arrangers who don't understand that the relationship between euphonium and tuba (in band transcriptions of orchestral music) is NOT the same as the relationship between cellos and basses in an orchestra. Sure, the tubas can PLAY the low notes that the string basses play, but they don't fill the same musical function when they're groveling down there! The use of Eb and BBb tubas is also something too many arrangers are ignorant of (and that's really a better analog of cello and bass), but it's never safe to assume that a band will have both available. (Says I who just moved back from bass trombone to Eb tuba because that's what our band needs this Fall; our terrific tubist from last Spring and Summer is now a Freshman music major at Indiana.) John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music School of Performing Arts & Cinema College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences 290 College Ave., Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[email protected]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "Machen Sie es, wie Sie wollen, machen Sie es nur schön." (Do it as you like, just make it beautiful!) --Johannes Brahms _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
