The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Part 6:
Arranging
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As you learned in Chapter 14, all of today’s music notation programs will auto-
matically perform this transposition for you, saving you the trouble of transpos-
ing all the instruments manually. With a program like Finale or Sibelius, you
can write the entire piece in concert pitch and then have the program create
individual output in the instruments’ transposed pitch. Easy!
Good Keys and Bad Keys
Because of the need to transpose the nonconcert key instruments, you can end
up with some instruments reading a whole bunch of sharps and flats, which of
course is problematic. For example, the concert key of A has three sharps, and is
relatively easy for nontransposing instruments to read. But for B
instruments,
such as trumpets, the transposed key is B, which has five sharps and is a bear to
read. For that reason, you probably want to avoid composing in the concert key
of A—unless you want to give your trumpet section a real workout!
In general, you want to arrange things so no instrument is reading more than
three sharps or flats. Taking this challenge into account, the following table
shows the best—and the worst—keys to compose in:
Good and Bad Concert Keys
Good Keys
Acceptable Keys
Bad Keys
E
C
D
F
G
D
B
A
E
G
A
B
Instrumental Ranges
Just as with voices, each instrument has its own particular range. There are cer-
tain notes that a trumpet, for example, just can’t play.
For that reason, you need to know the playable range for each instrument in the
orchestra, which is where the following table comes in. For each instrument
There are actually many more transpositions than listed in this table, especially
among the instruments used in classical music. For example, trumpets in D were
very often used by Mozart, Haydn, and other composers of their time.
One of the reasons for these different transpositions is that early trumpets and
horns had no valves, so there were only a limited number of notes available on
them. A composer would then choose a transposition that gave him the best
selection of available notes for each instrument.
Note
The notation 8va means to
play the note an octave
above what’s written. The
notation 8vb means to
play the note an octave
below what’s written.
Note

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Chapter 18:
Composing and Arranging for Voices and Instruments
listed (they’re grouped by family and alphabetized), you’ll find the actual range
(in concert pitch), and how you have to transpose those notes when you’re writing
for that instrument. (Mark my words: You’d better bookmark this table now!)
Instrument Ranges