On 10/09/2012 05:23 PM, Janek Warchoł wrote:
As for transposing clefs, i play guitar a bit myself, and i have once
typeset a piece using both G and G_8 clefs. Maybe it was a bad idea,
but for me it was perfectly fine.
Yes, definitely a bad idea. Use 8va. brackets instead when you want to
send everything up an octave like that. It was fine for _you_ because you wrote
it and knew what you wanted anyway, but it would have probably been confusing
for anyone else who had to read it, at least at initial glance.
Anyway, _most_ of the time you shouldn't need to do any such octave shifts --
it's only at the very extreme upper end of the instrumental register (and
sometimes lower, e.g. on piano) that you would bother.
It seems that our opinions on this subject are totally opposite.
While i definitely agree that the important thing is that performers
don't have to worry about this issue, in my opinion the *only* way to
ensure this is to state clef transpositions explicitely. After all,
it doesn't cost you anything to write them.
No, the only way to do it is to ensure that you have a well-defined standard for
how music is written for a given instrument, and ensure that composers,
publishers etc. know these standards and use them. To a large extent that's
what happens, but there are grey areas round some edges, usually where you're
seeing new areas of technique or even new instruments introduced.
Insisting on a strict employment of \treble or \treble_8 is in practice a good
way to increase the number of grey areas rather than reduce them, because it
increases the likelihood of multiple different non-uniform practices, and also
simply of errors -- errors in writing the part, and errors in playing it,
because \treble and \treble_8 are not visually distinct enough for a musician
reading the piece in real time.
In any case the player shouldn't have to face the question because as a matter
of course they should never encounter two clefs an octave apart in the same
piece -- you change clef to change the _staff_ pitches, not the relative octave.
For me, what we currently have is a holly mess. There are some areas
where ambiguity can be your goal, but i don't see how it could be
here. In my opinion it is *infinitely* better to write down the
information than to leave it to the performer to guess it based on
tradition.
It's not just "tradition" -- there are well-defined notational standards for
different instruments' notation, particularly for pitch, which you can find in
any decent orchestration manual.
The problems happen when composers or arrangers don't follow the rules, which
unfortunately happens more frequently than you'd like, and which to some extent
is exacerbated by reliance on music notation software (i.e., trusting that the
computer knows what it's doing rather than understanding and properly
researching the notational standards).
For example, despite the fact that i'm an amateur musician (guitar &
voice), i had learned note names quickly. However, for *many years* i
had no idea that some instruments are transposed. Had i tried to play
a transposed instrument, i would play exactly what was written. When
i learned that some instruments are transposed *and that the
transposition isn't marked in the notation*, i felt it was outrageous.
But it _is_ usually marked in the notation -- you'll get a part marked for
"Clarinet in B flat" or "Trumpet in D" or whatever, which tells you what the
transposition is. Albeit in some modern parts the instrument's transposition is
so standardized (e.g. alto sax is _always_ in E flat, though historically they
existed in F and other keys) that it isn't always written, but if you're a
composer, conductor or arranger it's reasonable to expect you to have read up on
the standards and to know them by heart.
I still believe it was a foolish idea to start notating transposing
instruments in this way, i.e. without any indication next to the clef
(no idea who started it, though :P).
You might want to read some of Schoenberg's writings :-) He made some proposals
for an alternative staff and clef system designed to better cope with the trend
towards atonal music. (Many of the potential ambiguities of transposition
actually resolve rather simply in a tonal setup.)
I think his ideas probably failed because apart from the weight of lock-in, the
main purpose of _individual_ instrumental notation is to make the easiest
possible mapping between what is written on the page and what the player has to
do. In the case of brass instruments that mapping basically needs to be common
to the overtone series of the instrument. In the case of woodwind instruments,
the notation needs to be common to the fingering -- whether I'm playing clarinet
in B flat, A, C or E flat, or bass clarinet, or alto clarinet, or basset horn,
if I see a written middle C I know to put down the thumb and first 3 fingers of
my left hand. I don'
