Tuba
The tuba is a large brass instrument in the bass-to-contrabass range with a wide, bugle-like conical bore and between three and six valves. It first appeared in 1835 in Prussia as the Baß-Tuba, an application of five valves to a bugle scaled up to 12-foot F, providing a fully chromatic contrabass range with a deep, full timbre. Subsequently, the Paris maker Adolphe Sax developed the E♭ and B♭ band tubas with piston valves as members of his saxhorn family by the 1850s, and Václav František Červený in Austria-Hungary developed contrabass tubas in C and B♭ with rotary valves in the 1870s.
As with any brass instrument, sound is produced with a lip vibration or "buzz" in the mouthpiece. A person who plays the tuba is called a tubaist or tubist, or simply a tuba player. In British brass bands and military bands, they are known as a bass player.
History
The early history of the tuba was the search for a practical valved brass instrument with a bass and contrabass voice, suitable for use in bands and the orchestra brass section. Before the emergence of the first valves in the 1820s, brass instruments were either restricted to a single harmonic series like the natural trumpet or bugle, or used a slide like the trombone, or used keys and tone holes like the keyed bugle or serpent.Origins
For the earliest low-pitched brass instruments, none of these solutions were ideal. Natural instruments can only approach diatonic or chromatic scales in their high register, bass trombones had long slides with handles which were unwieldy for rapid passages, and the timbre of the serpent was often criticized.To replace the serpent and its various upright derivatives, the Paris-based maker Jean Hilaire Asté invented the ophicleide in 1817, extending the keyed bugle into the bass register with a folded, bassoon-like form. It was a sufficient improvement, in both intonation and timbre, that it was widely adopted in brass and military bands. It was also used in the orchestra particularly by French composers, most notably Hector Berlioz. Although the ophicleide was initially successful, and serpents were still being used in bands and church ensembles, neither instrument could play much below C₂ into the contrabass range.
The first tubas
In the 1820s soon after the invention of valves, instruments with the same overall layout as the ophicleide but replacing its keys with valves appeared. These instruments were called valved ophicleides or bombardons. In Prussia, the military bandmaster Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht required an instrument capable of a secure contrabass compass for his bands, and with the Berlin-based instrument maker Johann Gottfried Moritz invented the in F. It used five Berlin valve valves to provide a chromatic compass down to F, its first fundamental or pedal tone. Berlin valves, invented by Wieprecht two years earlier, were capable of operating on the wider bore tubing of larger instruments than the earlier Stölzel and Vienna valve designs, which made the Baß-Tuba the first successful contrabass valved brass instrument.Paris-based instrument maker Adolphe Sax, like Wieprecht, was interested in marketing families of instruments ranging from soprano to bass, and developed his saxhorn series of brass instruments, pitched in E♭ and B♭. Sax's instruments gained dominance in French military bands, and later in Britain and America. Their widespread success was a result of the movements of popular instrument makers, notably Gustave Auguste Besson, who moved from Paris to London, and Henry Distin, who started manufacturing them in London, and later moved his business to the United States. The E♭ and B♭ saxhorns constitute almost the whole instrumentation of the modern British brass band, with the addition of cornets, trombones and a flugelhorn. The modern band tubas with top-action piston valves, compared to their 19th century contrabass saxhorn ancestors, are little-changed except for an expansion of bore and fourth compensating valve.
The helicon is thought to have first appeared in Russia in the mid-1840s, and first patented in 1848 in Vienna by Stowasser. Like the Ancient Roman buccina, its tubing is wrapped under the right arm with the bell resting on the player's left shoulder. The helicon also became popular throughout Europe and North America, particularly for its suitability for marching and mounted bands.
Early American tubas
In the United States saxhorns had become popular by the mid-19th century, particularly in military and brass bands. In 1838, the New York maker Allen Dodworth patented his "over-the-shoulder" instruments, with bells pointing backwards over the player's left shoulder, that included an E♭ bass model. This design allowed soldiers, usually marching behind the band, to better hear the music. Demand for bugles and OTS saxhorns grew, particularly in the early 1860s during the American Civil War, and tens of thousands were made in the United States or imported from Europe. After the war, the bands and their music remained popular, and manufacturing demand remained strong. From these ensembles and musicians emerged the American drum and bugle corps tradition, and the mixed-winds concert bands popularised by Patrick Gilmore and John Philip Sousa.In 1893, Sousa, unhappy with the sound from his BB♭ contrabass helicon tubas, had the Philadelphia instrument maker J. W. Pepper build a helicon with an upward-pointing bell, to better diffuse the sound. This sousaphone model was later made by the American manufacturers Holton and C. G. Conn, who some time in the early 20th century turned the bell forward to create the iconic modern form.
The tuba in Italy
The Italian word cimbasso, thought to be a contraction of the term corno basso, first appeared in scores as c. basso or c. in basso in the 1820s.Initially the cimbasso was a form of upright serpent or bass horn, but over the course of the 19th century the term was used loosely to refer to the lowest bass instrument available in the brass family, including the ophicleide and early Italian valved instruments such as the pelittone and bombardone. The Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, dissatisfied with the sound of these instruments, commissioned a valved contrabass trombone, built in the 1880s for his late operas. By the early 20th century this instrument, which he and Giacomo Puccini called simply the trombone basso in their scores, had disappeared from Italian orchestras, replaced by the tuba. The modern cimbasso, commonly called for in film and video game soundtracks, was revived from Verdi's instrument, via the German contrabass trombone in F, in the early 1980s.
Twentieth century developments
In Britain, the English F tuba was first produced in 1887 with 5 valves, similar to existing E♭ band instruments. Harry Barlow, appointed to Hallé Orchestra in 1894, had his F tuba built by Higham of Manchester, which survives in the University of Edinburgh collection. By the 1960s, the scarcity and expense of these "Barlow" model F tubas, combined with the illegality of importing foreign instruments, meant that British orchestral players switched to the readily available brass band E♭ tuba, with four compensating valves.In France, the orchestral tuba from the late 19th century until around the 1950s was the small, euphonium-sized French C tuba. It was based on the bass saxhorn, built in 8′ C with six piston valves. This instrument quickly became standard in French orchestras, and was the tuba written for by French composers of that time. The difficult high orchestral excerpts for tuba are often French tuba parts from this time, for example the "Bydło" tuba solo in Maurice Ravel's 1922 orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, though elsewhere the part also descends into the low register, to low F♯ in other movements.
In the early days of recorded music in the 1920s, were made with the bell pointing forward so their sound could more easily be directed towards the recording microphone. Extra players with recording tubas were sometimes brought in to play string section double bass parts, to compensate for the poor bass response of early microphones.
In 1933 Alfred Johnson, the production chief at the Michigan-based York Band Instrument Company, made two large C tubas for the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who wanted an organ-like tuba sound for the Philadelphia Orchestra. One of these instruments ended up in the hands of Arnold Jacobs, then a student, who later became principal tubist at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and an influential 20th century tuba pedagogue and player. Both instruments, known as the "Chicago Yorks", were purchased by the orchestra and used by the current principal tubist Gene Pokorny. Due to the quality of their sound and ease of playing, they are described by many American players and technicians as "the greatest tubas ever made", and the subject of much measurement, analysis and several attempts to recreate them. Replicas include the "Yorkbrunner" HB50 and HBS510 models by the Swiss instrument company Hirsbrunner, the Yamaha YCB-822 "Yamayork" model, the B&S 3198, and the Wessex TC-695 "Chicago York" tuba. In 2009, samples from old York tubas revealed they were made from brass with a higher than usual copper content of 80 percent, and about 100 York-inspired tubas were built by Kanstul in Anaheim, California before the business closed in 2019.