Author: Chris P
Date: 2024-06-19 00:13
If you put your cor in for repair and the repairer only has a written ticket from the member of staff that booked it in mentioning you're having trouble with low E, they're immediately going to check the fingered note and everything keywork and tonehole related to that note.
While having perfect pitch or relative pitch may be a blessing in some cases, it's a curse in others. Makers and repairers can't predict a small percentage of players refer to note names on their transposing instruments as the actual pitch instead of the written pitch, so they can't be held accountable for any misunderstanding.
Transposing instruments are made to give players the ease of playing instead of having to learn a completely different fingering system if they were all treated as Concert Pitch instruments. The only woodwind instruments I know of that use the Concert Pitch note naming system are recorders, only a few of them produce the actual written pitches.
And then when it comes to playing in period music ensembles at 415Hz on period instruments built to 415Hz, that too will be written at the sounding pitch calibrated to 415Hz instead of being written out a semitone lower than it sounds in relation to 440Hz.
I for one wouldn't want to have to learn a completely different fingering system for every transposing instrument I play built to Eb, D, C, Bb, A, G, F, Eb, C basso, Bb basso, A basso, EEb, CC and BBb when one fingering system can be used for the individual family of instruments built to those pitches and neither would I want to have to suffer the consequence of a misdiagnosis if I didn't treat them as anything other than the instruments they are if I was unaware they were treated any differenty by the player.
Conclusion - ALWAYS treat transposing instruments as transposing instruments and there won't be any misunderstanding.
Former oboe finisher
Howarth of London
1998 - 2010
The opinions I express are my own.
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