At 1:04 PM -0500 10/1/12, Robert Patterson wrote: >I switched back to concert pitch a few years ago. In my advancing years I >want no unnecessary barriers.
Hi, Robert, and of course to each his own on questions like this one. I personally find that a concert pitch score presents me with unnecessary barriers, since I want to see exactly what the players in front of me see. But of course I learned to read transposed scores starting in junior high school or perhaps even earlier, when I discovered my father's Rimsky-Korsakov orchestration books. And I continued to do so as I learned to play the various instruments themselves. But since I'm not a pianist, I've never felt restricted to just two non-transposed clefs. >Another reason is that in recent years I have >started writing a lot of vocal music, and no singer should ever be >presented a transposed score, not unless the singer has perfect pitch, or >unless you don't want to hear the pitches you wrote. I have to admit that this has me baffled. When would you EVER write for voices as transposing instruments?!!! Of course it's necessary to read all 9 movable clefs in order to do any historical research at all, but those aren't transpositions and never have been. Once the tenor C-clef was abandoned for choral tenor parts (post Brahms), that left the plain G clef ambiguous and on occasion confusing, as witness the efforts of Novello and some other publishers to come up with an alternative (TWO G clefs side-by-side, etc.), but the tenor sub-8 G-clef solves that problem nicely and without any ambiguity. Tradition takes care of most of the rest. Note entry is another story, of course, and I usually prefer to use concert pitch for that, but for conducting a concert pitch score presents a real barrier because I have to THINK about what the notes would be for the player instead of simply reading them as is. But to each his own. 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
