My music has no key signatures, so there is no notational cue what the transposition is. I struggle to remember at any given moment if it is clarinet in A or clarinet in Bb, for example. For a while I was putting the transposition in with the instrument abbrev. name, but that takes up space and doesn't jump out at you the way key signatures do.
For music with key signatures, I am totally okay with transposed scores. It's not a question of comfort level. It is a question of never having to ask questions. On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Robert Patterson < [email protected]> wrote: > No, I mean vocal chamber music with transposing instruments. > > > On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 1:35 PM, John Howell <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 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 >> > > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
