The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

232 Par t 6:Arranging

As you learned in Chapter 14, all of today’s music notation programs will auto-

matically perform this transposition for you, saving you the trouble of transpos-

ing all the instruments manually. With a program like Finale or Sibelius, you

can write the entire piece in concert pitch and then have the program create

individual output in the instruments’ transposed pitch. Easy!

Good Keys and Bad Keys

Because of the need to transpose the nonconcert key instruments, you can end

up with some instruments reading a whole bunch of sharps and flats, which of

course is problematic. For example, the concert key of A has three sharps, and is

relatively easy for nontransposing instruments to read. But for B
instruments,

such as trumpets, the transposed key is B, which has five sharps and is a bear to

read. For that reason, you probably want to avoid composing in the concert key

of A—unless you want to give your trumpet section a real workout!

In general, you want to arrange things so no instrument is reading more than

three sharps or flats. Taking this challenge into account, the following table

shows the best—and the worst—keys to compose in:

Good and Bad Concert Keys

Good Keys Acceptable Keys Bad Keys

E
CD

FGD

B
A
E

G
A

B

Instrumental Ranges

Just as with voices, each instrument has its own particular range. There are cer-

tain notes that a trumpet, for example, just can’t play.

For that reason, you need to know the playable range for each instrument in the

orchestra, which is where the following table comes in. For each instrument

There are actually many more transpositions than listed in this table, especially

among the instruments used in classical music. For example, trumpets in D were

very often used by Mozart, Haydn, and other composers of their time.

One of the reasons for these different transpositions is that early trumpets and

horns had no valves, so there were only a limited number of notes available on

them. A composer would then choose a transposition that gave him the best

selection of available notes for each instrument.

Note

The notation 8va means to

play the note an octave

above what’s written. The

notation 8vb means to

play the note an octave

below what’s written.

Note