I am just curious at what they mean on the Grade 6 trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn sylabus about the bit "Playing At Sight" It says, "Trumpet candidates must also be prepared to transpose a sight-reading test of approximatley grade 4 standard as for trumpet in C.

Has anyone ever had to transpose a sight-reading piece? And is it likely to come up in my exam ( i play cornet)

Thanks

I accompanied a Grade 6 Trumpet exam two terms ago and my understanding was that only Trumpets and Horns have to do the transposition at sight test but all brass players (like every other instrument) have to do a piece of standard sight-reading.

Why not check this out with your teacher - they should be able to clarify the situation. If you don't have a teacher, ring ABRSM HQ and double check with them. I would assume though if the syllabus says "trumpet", that's what it means.

Good Luck whatever.

I don't know why, but it is trumpets and not cornets. You have to transpose a piece and play it as welll as the standard sight reading. I had mastered the art of that in readiness for myGrade 6 then I failed my Grade 5 theory so had to put it on hold. I did Grade 3 and 4 cornet and 5 in trumpet and I noticed that on the syllabus that if I had carried onwith cornet I wouldn't have had to transpose for Grade 6. Anyway, it was easy enough

Thanks for your help mikeyc and oboist, so you think i definately won't need to transpose anything as i play the cornet. this is good news to me even though i have my grade 5 theory and can transpose it just confused me a little bit.

Yes, but there is a difference between being able to transpose on paper and going over it lots of times, and transposing at sight and playing it.

yes, that was what was worrying me. transposing on the spot and transposing it while playing! a difficult task i would say

The reason that trumpeters and horn players have to do it in exams is that they meet the requirement frequently in orchestral playing. Cornet players occasionally have to play from parts for A cornet in the orchestra, but brass band parts are always for Bb.

If you do enough orchestral playing, it becomes a lot easier. Classical parts are fairly straightforward, because the parts have rather few different notes, so you quickly learn the fingering that you use for them in a particular movement. It gets a bit trickier with early Wagner, in which the transposition keeps changing, and in Dvorak and R. Strauss, who wrote chromatic parts for various sizes of horn which get played on whatever you happen to own. This is usually an F horn, but even on a single Bb, you learn to play it from F parts, so that's how you think of it.

Some people with absolute pitch find transposition very difficult because the correspondence between what they see and what they hear is all wrong.

I agree with kenm, transposition is confusing at first but you get used to it, I can transpose into Eb and G (from F) in my sleep now... If you do need it for a grade at any time my advise would be pick use any piece of music and treat it like it needs to be transposed, preferably a piece that you dont play all the time as it will sound rather odd in another key!

I really can't transpose into E though... all the semitones confuse me!