At 03:10 PM 10/13/02 -0500, John Howell wrote: >Are you suggesting that orchestral clarinetists don't have >both A and Bb clarinets? Or that violists try to play their parts on >violins? Or ... or what?
A least four real-life examples that have happened to me (in performance): Right on #1! Amateur orchestra with only a Bb clarinet to play the part written for A clarinet. A tenor sax substituting for a French horn player who got sick. Violins redistributed to cover the viola part because only one violist arrived. A part-time conductor who could not read a transposed score well enough to hear mistakes. Also, I live in Vermont, and only recently have there been enough players to go around in the smaller orchestras. I write considerable music for amateur ensembles, so my job is to help the performance, not hinder it. Since the bulk of my music is keyless, there's really no point to making a transposition with a key signature, while it's confusing to tranpose it without one. I go with simple, so everybody with basic skills can read it. If you're a professional conductor, you can read a concert-pitch score as well as anything else anyway, right? If you're not, you probably need a concert-pitch score for efficiency -- especially if you have seriously chromatic/atonal music that offers no harmonic guides. By the way, I just had a look, and the UE Berg Chamber Concerto for violin, piano & 13 winds, for example, is at concert pitch: "In dieser Partitur gibt es ... keine transponierenden Instrumente mehr. Alle Instrumente (auch Piccolo und Kontrafagott) klinge dem nach so, wie sie notiert sind." Even professional conductors often depend on tonal harmonic context to read transposed scores. (Not just context; sometimes they depended on other assistance, such as recordings -- Leinsdorf slammed his colleagues pretty hard some years ago in "The Composer's Advocate", as did Slonimsky on a regular basis.) I recall an embarrassing incident at a house party where a over-happy conductor was wailing through some Beethoven symphony from the full score. Then I opened some atonal goodie sitting on the piano for him to play. That didn't last long, though he got some of the string parts right. :) Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
