were to hold a guitar tuner up next to the piano while you hit the key, the
tuner would read C. The end. According to current standards, middle C (C4)
on the piano is a tone that vibrates at 261.63 Hz. A4, the A above middle C, is
pegged at 440 Hz.
However, if you were to play a C on what is called a transposing instrument,
you would get another note entirely, and this is where it can get confusing.
For example, if you were playing a B flat clarinet, and the note on sheet music
was notated C, you would actually be playing a B flat. If you were to play a
written C on an E flat alto sax, you would actually be playing an E flat.
The easy answer for why transposing instruments are the way they are has as
much to do with the convenience of musicians as historical tradition. Most
instruments are too small to contain the 88 notes of a piano, so most instru-
ments you’ll deal with as a composer have only a fraction of the piano’s
tones available for use. Brass and woodwind instruments are built so that by
depressing or releasing sequential valves, the musician either moves up or
down to the next note of the scale. This scale is read as the C scale when the
musician is playing alone, even if the instrument is actually tuned to the B flat
or E flat or any other scale.
All instruments in both woodwind and brass families are designed this way,
and because of this, a clarinetist can theoretically pick up a saxophone for
the first time and, if he can blow strong enough to make the transition work,
can soon play a song he or she is familiar with on the clarinet. This same
musician can pick up an oboe or a flugelhorn or any other brass or woodwind
instrument and make just as easy a transition. Depending on the instrument,
there may be one or two extra or fewer buttons on the instrument’s body, but
the main notes — A, B, C, D, E, F, and G — will be there.
Back in the day, instrument designers had two choices: Either create a series
of similarly shaped and sounding instruments tuned to the same key but with
different fingerings, or create the same series of instruments with different
tunings but with the same arrangement of fingerings. When you consider the
basic physics of the matter, you can see that there is no way for a clarinet to
have the same valve pattern of an oboe and sound the same, simply because
one is much smaller than the other and therefore, the smaller one naturally
has a higher pitch than the other. It’s the difference between the high-pitched
squeal that comes from air being forced through a tiny hose and the deeper-
pitched squeal that comes through a bigger hose.
When a soloist on one of these instruments performs alone, there aren’t a lot
of pitch conflicts to worry about. However, when you get two or more different
types of horns in the same room together, the differences in the instruments’
set tunings become very obvious. In order to play together, each musician has
to transpose, or move to a different key, up or down the necessary steps so that
all of the instruments in the room are playing the same C.
Part IV: Orchestration and Arrangement.....................
