Transposed music

Post Reply New Topic

I just discovered that I can't play transposed music and enjoy myself. This is weird because I don't have absolute pitch.

A lot of people have a sense of where the pitch of a song should be; I read a study once (can't remember where) that showed that a fair number of people consistently sung their favourite songs at their correct pitch.

Why do you think you don't enjoy playing transposed music?

It just sounds wrong and I want to make it sound right. I play more robotically because I don't enjoy that feeling and I don't enjoy playing because I don't like listening to robotically played music. I also make more mistakes because it's kind of exhausting playing transposed music.

What's transposed music? I'm an old geezer---I don't know some of this new-fangled technology

That makes sense.
My big problem with playing transposed music is that I do have perfect pitch, and my fingers tend to be guided by that, and the discrepancy between what they're doing and what I'm hearing throws me off in a major way.
Other than that, I enjoy hearing music transposed to all different keys; I like hearing the differences in sound.



To transpose music means to put it in a different key: basically, to make it higher or lower so that the pitch that feels like "home" is different than before.

It's also very old-fangled technology, kraftiekortie.

Transposition changes the timbre. Each instrument has several different timbres dependent on register. Say for example I have a violin play a melody that stretches from middle c up to c4-- the violin will sound fairly "meaty" and "thick." Now let's say I transposed it up a perfect fifth (now in the key of G) and stretched it from G3 to G4, the violin will sound "meaty" on the G3, A, B, C, and D, but start to have a "brittle" sound on E, F#, and G4. The melody will be the same but the timbre will be off, noticeable even without perfect pitch.

This is why I cringe on half the the orchestra to symphonic band arrangements I hear, the arranger almost always changes the key to fit the new instrumentation. Imagine that same change in timbre, but on an entire symphonic band...disgusting.