[David H. Bailey:]
>Traditionally bass clarinetists read music in treble clef, sounding a
>major 9th lower, so that soprano clarinetists can simply pick up a bass
>clarinet and start playing. It gets back to the whole transposing
>instrument thing, where the music has to be transposed so the player can
>simply switch to the appropriately pitched instrument and keep on
>playing as always. A tradition I wish had never happened, but there you
>have it.
I would have thought that the clearest way of writing parts would be for
everything to sound exactly at its sounding pitch, and I personally do not like
transposing in scores. I know what most of the more common transpositions are,
but when I try to read a complex score, with several different kinds of
transposition in them, I find it almost impossible to put everything in place
and to actually work out the details of what's happening - you have to move your
eye from staff to staff quite often to actually work out what the harmony and
texture are, for example, and when you're doing that it's very difficult if you
have to work out, for each staff, what the transposition is, and therefore what
note is actually sounding. It seems to me that score-reading would be
simplified to a very great degree if all parts were written at actual pitch and
in the appropriate clef - and I have seen this done in some 20th-century scores.
Well, I have to grant that players of transposing instruments are not used
to reading parts at concert pitch - but now that we can use computers to notate
music, there would seem to be something to be said for producing scores written
at concert pitch, but, when extracting parts that players are to read from,
putting the appropriate transpositions and clef changes in. That way, you can
simplify score-reading (greatly, not just trivially), and yet satisfy players
who wish to read parts that follow the various transpositions, traditional
clefs, and the like.
Regards,
Michael Edwards.
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