Daniel F Heiman wrote: >The point is that on brass instruments, pitch is in large part determined by the tension of the >lip muscles.
>Let's say that we are talking about playing an 'a" above the staff in modern treble clef. This is >at least a moderately high note on either a modern or a Baroque valveless trumpet. To >produce that note in the Tief-Kammerton environment, the player has to generate frequency >of about 800 Hz. To produce that note in the Cornett-Ton environment, the player has to >produce a frequency of around 940 Hz. The difference in terms of muscular effort required is >quite substantial. But why would it be? In either case, he's playing the 11th harmonic on whatever horn he's playing. He should be doing the same thing with his embouchure (which is buzzing with his lips, not producing the frequency that comes out the bell) and the only thing that would change is the length of the horn he's blowing. The same buzz that produces the A above the staff on a trumpet in C will produce a written A on a trumpet in E flat, but it will sound the C a third higher. This is the same pitch difference, more or less, as there would be between tief kammerton and chorton. (Time out for those who may not know what Dan and I are talking about: The valveless trumpet for which Bach--and Beethoven and Mendelssohn--wrote always read a part written in C, and used longer or shorter lengths of inserted tubing to adjust the trumpet's length, and thus pitch, to whatever key it was playing in. The longest was in nominal B flat, the shortest in F.) If high notes were harder on a shorter horn, some composers would surely have written lower for the trumpet in F than for the trumpet in C. But I don't see that: I think Bach's trumpet parts, for example, always top out at written D above high C regardless of the actual pitch. Perhaps we've strayed a bit off topic? Let me try to reel it in. Trumpet parts were written in a sort of tablature, with the notes representing not pitch per se, but what the player needed to do. And the notation lent itself to transposing by picking up a bigger or smaller instrument, just as a lutenist might transpose a lute song tablature by playing it on a D or A lute instead of a G lute. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
