Hi Alan and Everyone,
Alan's story goes right along with what I had to do for Christmas eve this year. I was hired to do a kind of a "Transiberian Orchestra" kind of church service. A rock band, string quartet and me playing on one side of a gymnasium (the church is new and does not have a building as of this time) and on the other side a Jamaican Steel Band. The person who booked the string quartet is a music teacher and when the music coordinator told her he wanted a hornist, she told him, "you know that the horn is a transposing instrument"? He said, yes! and proceeded to totally mess up everything I was to play. I went nuts trying to first figure out what he'd written, he had parts that were written below the cello, so I asked him if that is what he really wanted...He replied, no, but here's a rhythm score for the rhythm guitar, fake some parts from that...
I had one piece, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Changes Everything that I had a 4 bar melody intro. The rock band was so loud and for lack of a better term Twangy...that I had a hard time hearing. It was the first piece we played before I knew the transpositions were messed up and played what was written. The singer started and quickly stopped saying I can't find my pitch...I quickly figured out the guy wrote the transposition wrong, and quickly upped everything a fifth...Then everything was ok...Just another story from the "battle front". At least it paid well and made my Christmas very merry...
Have a great day,
Walt Lewis
At 06:22 PM 1/13/2005 -0500, you wrote:
A couple of years ago I signed up to play a brass ensemble Easter church gig. Most of the parts in my book were for Horn In F. But for the Hallelujah Chorus, I got the part for 2nd Trumpet In D (or some such key). No way around it -- I had to write out a Horn In F transposition, painstakingly, note for note. Except for a couple of phrases that I had to re-transpose down an octave, it worked OK to play the part on horn in place of trumpet. Even those down-octave phrases sounded all right in performance.
Octave transpositions are so easy that I don't even think of'm as transpositions.
-- Alan Cole, rank amateur McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.
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