many recorders are made to A=435 so will have to transpose up a semitone in order to mix with those that use A=440.

Not many.

Purpose-built A=415 recorders are uncommon, hand-made and very expensive. I have a cheap semitone-flat descant recorder made in purple glittery plastic, probably a design mistake in some Oriental toy factory 10 years ago; I use it on occasions when playing along with guitarists capoed up into silly places. I have never encountered another recorder at that pitch on the folk scene and have never got to handle a real A=415 recorder myself.


Hehe,

Is that out of Beavis and Butthead or what?


you know one really needs to develop quite a skill to transpose all the flutes that one might reasonably encounter.

No you don't. As I said, if you've done it for two different pitches others come very quickly. In practice almost all bagpipe players do it, since Highland bagpipe music is written with six-fingers-down making an A, Northumbrian bagpipe music with six-fingers-down making a G, and pipers almost invariably play the D whistle as well (six-fingers-down makes D). Lots of whistle players can read at pitch for a C whistle. This is not at all a rare and unusual skill.

Note that we haven't heard from anybody in this thread who's seriously tried to learn to read at pitch and failed. All the panic and naysaying is coming from people who are afraid to even start. (If only we could spread a similar amount of horror about learning to drive - a far more complex skill - the world would be a much better place).


Who can read can read tunes like Ornithology or similarly harmonically rich tunes on a baroque recorder with guitar accompaniment?

Tune like that are a bugger to get your fingers round. That's where the difficulty lies. If you can play them at all you won't have a problem with the notation.

One thing like that I play sometimes is Thelonious Monk's "Ask Me Now", on the F alto in the original key of D flat. Before I had it in my head I was using at-pitch notation - the notation never even registered as an issue, the unusual fingering patterns were what I had to get to terms with.

If I remember right, "Take Five" is at a convenient pitch for C recorder but I have never yet managed to play it properly with all of Paul Desmond's twiddles in - the fact that it only uses primary-school notational conventions doesn't help one little bit with actually playing the thing.