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Is the music written for some instruments usually in a particular key?

As a guitarist, I know the majority of music written for classical guitar is in the major keys of C, G, D, A and E, and minor keys of Dm, Am, Em, and Bm. This is due to the tuning of the open strings, making chords in those keys easier to play.

There are basically three reasons for many instruments seeming to be ‘limited’ to certain keys.

[i] As Delicio says, most modern instruments have few physical limitations to the keys that are available to them, but this key preponderance still applies.

[a]Custom. Key preponderance can often be mainly due to ‘tradition’… Players inherit a preference from their forebears, perhaps.

[b] Laziness. e.g.Guitarists seem to love the key of E, their bottom note (I think). It is apparently ‘easier’ to play in this basic tonality? Pianists seem to adore C major or A Minor, as they find these keys ‘easy’ to read. etc.

[c] Facility. Although, since the advent of equal temperament, there is little musical justification for a preference for only a few keys, some keys are somehow much easier to play in. (I’m not sure that this is always completely true in many cases, and that the real reason is really [b])

[d] Mood. e.g. as the chief character of the Organ is one of ‘majesty’, the use of the lowest pitched pipes on the pedal best achieves this mood. Thus, the keys close to the bottom note (C) are more popular for ‘grand’ music for that instrument. The same idea, perhaps, applies in similar ways to instruments such as the Guitar, the Cello, the Bassoon, etc.

[e] It is perhaps sad that the vast majority of art music we hear is by dead composers. These composers, so often, lived when there WERE physical limitations to the keys available.

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[ii] Some widely used instruments actually have severe physical reasons for avoiding certain keys.

[a]The most obvious are the Bugle and the Bagpipes, perhaps.

[b]However, many other ‘old’ instruments, such as the Recorder or the Krummhorn, apparently have physical limitations which almost preclude certain keys.

[c]Fretted instruments, always hard to play ‘in tune’, may have certain reasons for the avoidance of certain keys apart from those in [i] (I’m not sure of this).

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[iii] Practicality.

[a] If an instrument is found to ‘sound better’ in some keys than in others, for any reason, it is easy to see why certain keys are rarely used. The reasons, of course, are often due to the limitations of the performers, as in [i]

[b] Brass instruments, theoretically completely equal tempered, have a ‘better sound’, it is claimed, if the key is related to the actual length of their tube. At one time, it was rare to come across a work for Trumpet in any key other than D Major! The use of valves to alter the fundamental length of the tube [gradually] removed this limit. ( The most pitch-flexible modern brass instrument, the Trombone, still is said to sound ‘better’ in some keys than in others.)
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The present situation.

Imagine trying to accompany the bugle with a piano. It is to the credit of performers (and composers) that the extreme pitch limitations of the bugle or the bagpipes have been disguised so adroitly. [By all rights, neither instrument 'belongs' to the contemporary music environment.]

With the advent of atonal music (over 100 years ago!), several of the above instruments were reeling. (Imagine, e.g., the bagpipes trying to play Webern.)
It also exposed the illusion that we had actually achieved ‘equal temperament’. Our old ideas about preferred keys had persisted, it seems.

As we are exposed so much to ‘rock’ and ‘pop’ music, where notes are frequently (and painfully!) as much as a quarter-tone out of tune, our communal sensitivity to pitch accuracy simply has to have fallen. Perhaps, in the end, this insensitivity to intonation precision will even begin to extinguish the preferences for certain keys?

Interesting question.

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