Transposing instrument

A musical instrument whose written notes sound at pitches different from those shown in its notation. Its notation usually preserves familiar fingerings across instruments of different sizes.

Concert pitch: The actual sounding pitch of a note, or notation that represents pitches as they sound. Transposing parts differ from concert-pitch notation by a fixed interval.
Musical interval: The distance in pitch between two musical notes, measured by the relationship between their frequencies or note names. A transposing instrument’s written-to-sounding difference is specified as an interval.
Orchestration: The art and practice of assigning musical material to instruments in an ensemble. Orchestrators account for each instrument’s written and sounding pitches when preparing parts.
Non-transposing instrument: An instrument whose written notes ordinarily sound at the same pitches. It provides the direct alternative to instrument-specific pitch shifts.
Transposition (music): The shifting of a musical passage to a different pitch level while preserving its interval relationships. An instrument’s notation applies a consistent pitch shift between written and sounding notes.
Written pitch: The pitch represented by a note in musical notation, before any instrument-specific transposition is applied. It is the notated side of the instrument’s pitch relationship.
Clarinet: A single-reed woodwind instrument with a cylindrical bore and a wide range spanning several registers. Clarinet parts commonly appear in several transpositions, including B-flat and A.
C instrument: An instrument whose written notes sound at their notated pitches, apart from possible octave displacement. C instruments contrast with instruments whose notation transposes by other intervals.
Octave transposition: Notation or performance in which a passage sounds one or more octaves away from its written pitch. Some instruments transpose by octaves, leaving pitch class unchanged.
Sounding pitch: The pitch actually produced by a musical performance or instrument. It is the sounding side of the instrument’s pitch relationship.

Linked from 13 pages