wrog

a healthy respect for the challenges of playing on a transposing instrument.

So I was originally going to answer this in the comments but this is really a huge topic worth its own post. It's always been a bit weird what people think should be difficult vs. what actually is difficult.

See, playing a transposing instrument isn't supposed to be a challenge. In fact, I'm sure the whole reason transposing instruments exist was to make it easier, and for folks who only have relative pitch sense, which is most of the population, I'm pretty sure that's the case.

That is, you see a C on the page, C has a particular fingering ('O'/open, if we're talking about a typical valved brass instrument) and you're done. You blow, and you'll know whether you have the right note if it's the correct interval away from whatever pitch you're using as a reference, whether it's a previous note that you played, or that somebody else played, or there's this huge chain of inference leading back to the start of the session when whoever it was blew on the pitch pipe. If, say, your reference happens to be denoted as B in your part, and you're now being called upon to play a C, then you need to be up a half step, and you'll be able to hear that. And that's really all you need.

The question of what the actual concert pitch might be is quite irrelevant. That you might be playing on a B♭ trumpet so that a denoted C comes out as a (concert) B♭, or a D trumpet where the same written note comes out as a (concert) D, or that the person who's playing your reference tone thinks of it as some note that's completely different from what you're thinking it is, you don't have to care.

This way the individual instrumentalists just get to focus on playing the notes that are on the page in front of them. Making sure that the corresponding sounds will match up with what everybody else is doing is the composer's problem, not yours.

Now, I'm sure that, for the conductor, this is a huge fucking mess, but dealing with that is part of why they get paid the big bucks (hahahaha).

At this point, I'll just note the weirdness of having to reverse-engineer how relative-pitch-only people think of things. Which is the best I can do because I have no personal experience of this.

I can only tell you how it works for me. I can't even be sure how much my experience generalizes to how other absolute pitch people experience things, because this only shows up in 1 out of 30,000 people on average, and I still have yet to encounter anyone else who has it.

(except possibly for my son Philip, who I have reason to believe has it, or, rather, there are certain things that he's done that would otherwise be very difficult to explain if he didn't have it, but because he's autistic and thus doesn't have the language to talk about it, I'll probably never know for sure).

But first we need to straighten out some misconceptions:

What is Absolute Pitch?

( Read more... )

So here's a puzzler

Brief review of the physics of wind instruments

Your standard wind instrument is a pipe attached to some kind of sound source (lip or reed). Being of a certain length it resonates at particular frequencies and suppresses the others, ulimately being capable of producing tones that are multiples of a certain fundamental frequency f, 2f being an octave higher than f, 3f being a fifth above that and so on.

The main things to keep in mind about the multiples of f (the "harmonic series"):

1. going up by a particular interval means multiplying the frequency (or dividing the wavelength) by a particular ratio (2 ↔ octave, 3/2 ↔ perfect fifth, 5/4 ↔ major third, etc.…), and
2. intervalwise, the notes are getting closer together the higher you go.

Eventually, the notes get so close to each other that you can do scales of a sort -- this is how the natural (i.e., valveless) French horn works; the tube is so damned long that you're always playing in the 8f-16f range and then you just fudge the few notes that are out of tune with lip and hand-in-the-bell tricks. ... and likewise for why baroque trumpet parts are so insanely high-pitched.

But if you want to do anything useful down in the lower register, you have no choice but to mess with the length of the tube somehow, the two most popular methods being

1. (the woodwind solution) poke holes in the tube (and cover them with removable keys)
2. (the brass solution) insert valves or slides in the tube to change its actual length

We'll focus on the second solution since I really have no freaking clue what's going on with woodwinds. Oddly enough, the brass solution is simpler but it didn't come along until fairly late in the game. Not until the 19th century did metalworking technology finally get good enough that Heinrich Stölzel was able to construct the first actual valved instrument in 1814. Once this happened it didn't take long to catch on -- hence the 19th century explosion in the use of brass instruments in orchestral works (cf. Wagner, Mahler...).

So how do valves actually get used?

Let's first get clear what a valve is: ( Yes, we are going deep into the weeds. You knew this was going to happen )

Well, it only took about 13 hours,

and I only broke one string. Well okay, last time around, I broke zero strings, that being the recommended number, seeing as fixing that sort of thing is definitely out of my league. Fortunately, it's way up near the top of the piano --- things had gone a bit flat there so I'm a bit surprised I didn't break more, but still, urg.

The C major and F major chords are to die for (K-III makes C-E a pure major third and F-A nearly so while F-C is a perfect fifth)

The rest of it sounds a bit wonky.

How much of this is

1. old, crappy, upright piano, vs.
   
2. non-ET tunings are inevitably going to sound weird if you've spent your whole life listening to ET, vs.
   
3. no, I didn't actually get it right after all
   

is anybody's guess.

Well okay, I'm going to guess (3).