User talk:Tuc

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[edit] Transposing Instruments

** E♭ soprano clarinet
** Sopranino saxophone
Do these match or not?

It's not so much a matter of matching as following a rule. These aren't sentences, but they're like sentences: the first letter ought to be capitalized. Maybe you'd write a sentence like "E♭ Soprano clarinets are played in the Mahler symphonies" but I wouldn't; "soprano" is neither a proper noun nor the first word in the sentence.

** C-soprano sax. You commented this out, but hundreds or thousands of these things exist. I have seen one.

Okay, I'd forgotten about these. Should go back in. (Without the hyphen, though, for consistency.)

** F-baritone sax: Maybe this deserved to be commented out, as only prototypes were made. 
** C-bass sax: This is the first saxophone that Sax demonstrated to the public in 1841.

It's hard to know where to draw a line. I suppose people (including me) want to mention the octocontra clarinets just because they're so big and so low pitched as to make them interesting, even though they've never been in production. F baritone saxes, though... unusual, yes, but hardly (I think) as interesting! Do any still exist, do you know? Or any C basses?

I suppose the following all are plausible criteria:

  • Instruments that have ever existed
  • Instruments that exist
  • Instruments that exist in numbers greater than xxx
  • Instruments that have ever been in production
  • Instruments that are in production
  • Instruments for which composers have written music (on the grounds that an instrument can hardly be said to be transposing if no music exists for it to transpose)

All these have drawbacks of course (for instance, as it says in the sax article, Ravel wrote for sopranino sax in F, a nonexistent instrument!) Only the first two, I think, are reasonably immune to argument, and the first is overly broad. But I don't feel particularly strongly. I do think, though, that the description of "rare" or even "very rare" is inadequate for instruments that have only ever existed as prototypes. -- Rsholmes 17:48, 22 March 2007 (UTC)