Are woodwind instruments in certain tonality's?

Answer 1

Yes. There are instruments tuned/made in a certain key. The most common keys to put instruments in are C, Bb and Eb (in that order but C wins by a landslide). Some instruments are also in G but are much less common, and all the other keys are even less so and difficult to find if they happen to exist. Each instrument has a certain key that they typically come in, but some can/have been manufactured in different keys whether for ease of transposition, for playing older/more modern music, popular demand or just because. For example, the Alto Saxophone is typically in Eb, but in the early 20th century one in C was manufactured for some time. Today these saxophones are hard to come by and can be very expensive; for this instrument, putting it in C is useful for playing last minute gigs in which the music may not be in the alto Saxophone's normal key, Eb. Similarly, the Trumpet is normally in Bb, but it is common for players to use a C trumpet for older, pre-19th or 20th century orchestral music for reasons of authenticity in tone color and/or transposition depending on score version.

Note: Putting an instrument in a certain key means that the C on the instrument, the note around which western music, at least, has come be centered, is enharmonically the same as/sounds the same as the note whose key the instrument is in, played on the piano. For example, on the Eb alto saxophone, C sounds like an Eb played on the piano because it is in the key/tonality of Eb. All other notes on that instrument will have the same proportion of distance between the name of the note in its individual context and the note it actually sounds like on the piano or any other C instrument (flute, violin). All notes on the Eb alto saxophone are three half steps (three consecutive notes in pitch order) lower than the enharmonic (actual) note that sounds when it is played.

Try it: play a C on a transposing instrument like the alto saxophone and then play a C on a non-transposing (C) instrument like the piano and hear the difference.

The purpose of these tonalities is to bring an instrument's range to width that can easily be written on a score. If the Eb alto saxophone was not transposed, for example, some of its upper notes would require many leger lines to display. It is simply more convenient to have it in Eb so that a composer has no hesitations in using its entire lovely range.