Re: Transposing instrument best practice

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

Hi,

> Given the highly confusing nature of the subject, wouldn’t it be 
> better if the NR took a clear stance toward one of the ways as ‘best 
> practice’?
>
> Which way would that be? What experiences did you make?

(I still dispute the description of the subject as highly confusing, but 
this may be an instance of "déformation professionnelle" since I am 
often in the position of having to convince students that there is no 
need to fear transposing instruments ;-).)

For what it's worth, I can describe my practice - for me it may well be 
"best" practice:

GENERAL RULE: I like to have the contents of a music variable in concert 
pitch at all times. This means, I want to make sure that if I just combine

<<
  \new Staff \clarinetI
  \new Staff \clarinetII
  \new Staff \violinI
>>

in conjunction with \midi, everything should fit.

This implipes:

ENTERING: Whether I actually enter the \clarinetI notes in written or in 
sounding pitch depends on the source. In most cases, the source will be 
transposing (not in sounding pitch), and since I'm too lazy to transpose 
on-the-fly, I enter written pitch and wrap everything in a \transpose 
command:

clarinetI = \transpose c' a {
  % music copied directly from a part written for Clarinet in a.
} % the variable now contains the music in concert pitch

(Actually, this means that while entering the Clarinet music, I "hear" 
the piece in the wrong key since, having perfect pitch, I tend to hear 
the note of the name I'm typing. That's not ideal, but less of an 
inconvenience than transposing everything while typing.)

Of course, one can also omit the \transpose command and instead perform 
an actual transposition of the written note names using the neat tools 
that Frescobaldi offers. This way one actually "sees" concert pitch in 
the source code.

SCORE/PART DESIGN: Since all my music variables are in sounding pitch, I 
have to re-transpose them when creating the actual score and parts (I 
almost never create concert pitch scores):

\new Staff \with { instrumentName = \markup{ Clarinetto in \italic la } 
} { \transposition a \transpose a c' \clarinetI }

Here, the \transposition command makes sure that a midi file that might 
be generated from the score uses the right transposition.


Of course, this way of handling things leads to a redundant bunch of 
transpositions and re-transpositions (if I enter a written clarinet part 
in written pitch, \transpose it to make sure the music variable contains 
sounding pitches, and \transpose it back in order to recreate the 
clarinet part for the player). But I like the conceptual idea of my 
general rule that a music variable should _always_ contain music in 
actual concert pitch.


A drawback of this method seems to be that it's quite hard to implement 
mid-piece changes of transposition. I somehow never seem to need this; 
but if I ever had the need to typeset an old-style French Horn part that 
changes transposition every few bars, I would probably abandon my 
"general rule", enter written pitch and define a music function 
\changeTransposition that i) issues the proper \transposition command 
and ii) generates a text markup like "in fa".

Best
Lukas