A bit confusing if you position the drums according to Germanic tradition! (And dont forget that the player has two sticks, with which he or she could easily beat you up…)
David
Right. These were natural horns, no valves. So the notes on the page were not really pitches, but instead indicated where to play relative to the instrument’s natural harmonic series.
Of course, today almost all horn parts are played on valved instruments, and almost always pitched in F (or in a double valve system with fundamentals in F and Bb.) Horn players generally learn to read music in F, and they transpose everything else. So if there is no compelling reason to do otherwise, horn parts should be written in F.
The brass band tranditions may be different. My comments are mostly about concert band and orchestral horn.
Timps written using C and G follow exactly the same principle. They are not really pitches, but instead indicated which drum to hit!
Fun fact - in some 18th century manuscript scores, the brass and timp parts are written on separate sheets of paper from the rest of the orchestra - first because the composer’s standard supply of MS paper didn’t have enough staves for them, second because they were sometimes optional in performance, and third because they were often composed by a student or copyist, not by the composer of the main work!
So having all the optional parts in the same written key (i.e. C) had some practical value.
Standard brass bands don’t use French horns anyway. But I’m not going to attempt to justify their notation conventions for other instruments - except for the general principle that the staff notation in consistent with the fingering and harmonic series number for (almost) all the instruments, regardless of the sounding pitch of the notes. The logic behind that was to make it easy for beginners to start on cornet and then transfer to other instruments without the need to re-learn “how to read” the new instrument’s part.
Today, I’m transcribing an orchestral piece by Haydn that has Timpani in D.
At the very least, it would be nice to have a transposing instrument for use while transcribing the score, even if I changed it later on in the process.
I use the transposing/clef feature in setup mode for this. You can do it on both the score and the part
Oh, of course! I didn’t think it would work for the Score, for some reason. I’m somewhat ‘out of my comfort zone’ with a piece written after 1750…! 
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This is not so. In the Classical period, when there were only two timpani tuned in fourths, they were often notated as C-G, even though they sounded D-A or whatever. There is a current move to notate scores as the composer did, rather than transcribe them into modern notation, and this would be part of it.
Horns that transcribed from the original key of the composer look really wierd transposed to F.
David
A true (as far as I can remember it) story about transposing timpani parts:
Many years ago I found myself involved in a Come & Sing Messiah — a fundraising event for some charity which ended in a much-cut and under-rehearsed hour-long Messiah ‘performance’ after an afternoon of ‘rehearsal’.
As is often the way with these things, everything was done on a shoestring, with ratty old orchestral parts, and the band was a real curate’s egg, a pro-am mix. I was playing cello. The timpanist who had agreed to play couldn’t make it on the day, so when that became apparent, someone was found who was willing to have a go. The show must go on etc.
She could obviously read the part okay. Unfortunately the timps were wildly out of tune. I thought she either didn’t notice or didn’t know what to do about it.
In the break between rehearsal and concert, I decided I’d do everyone a favour and tune them to D and A, and I then went off for a meal, thinking no more about it.
When the concert was about to begin, as the orchestra was finishing tuning, I suddenly became aware that she was tuning the timps herself (she had a little chromatic tuner) back to C and G. Like the part was written. And the conductor and soloists were walking on to begin. I couldn’t stop her.
And so it went, very slightly bitonally. She seemed quite happy with her contribution. I was relieved the timpani weren’t in more of it. It was the last scratch Messiah I ever did, partly for that reason.
(This same performance had an extraordinary rendition (I use the phrase intentionally) of He was despised which went at two radically different speeds, a very slow one by the conductor and a rather faster one by the alto, every time she came in. A truly awful experience in almost every way.)
J
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