Euphonium
The euphonium is a tenor- and baritone-voiced valved brass instrument pitched in 9-foot B♭ an octave below the B♭ trumpet or cornet, employed chiefly in brass, military, and concert bands. The euphonium is a member of the large family of valved bugles, along with the tuba and flugelhorn, characterised by a wide conical bore. Most instruments have four valves, usually compensating piston valves, although instruments with four or five rotary valves are common in Eastern and Central Europe.
Euphonium repertoire can be notated in concert pitch in the bass clef, or in the treble clef as a transposing instrument in B. In British brass bands, it is typically treated as a treble-clef instrument, while in American band music, parts may be written in either treble clef or bass clef, or both. A musician who plays the euphonium is known as a euphoniumist, a euphonist, or simply a euphonium player.
Name
The euphonium derives its name from the Ancient Greek word εὔφωνος, meaning "pleasant-sounding" or "sweet-voiced".The euphonium has many relatives in the large and diverse family of valved bugles to which it belongs. The baritone horn found in British brass bands, although similar, has a narrower conical bore, smaller bell, and often lacks a fourth valve. The American baritone with three front-mounted piston valves, a narrower conical bore, and a curved forward-pointing bell, was dominant in American school marching bands throughout most of the 20th century. This instrument, along with the euphonium and similar-looking cylindrical bore instruments like the trombonium, were almost universally lumped together and labelled baritone by both band directors and composers. Band scores and manufacturers have sometimes treated them as the same instrument, or used the word baritone to refer to the euphonium, thus contributing to a confusion of terminology in the United States.
Ferdinand Sommer's Sommerophone was patented in Berlin in 1844 as the Euphonion, and adopted in Britain as the euphonium after Sommer toured it in the 1850s. The euphonium is sometimes called the tenor tuba particularly by British composers, although this term can also refer to other types of tuba. Names in scores in other languages include the French basse, saxhorn basse, and tuba basse; German Baryton, Tenorbass, and Tenorbasshorn; Italian baritono, bombardino, eufonio, and flicorno basso. In Italy, flicorno tenore refers to the narrower bore baritone, while flicorno baritono and flicorno basso refer to the euphonium with three or four valves, respectively.
The most common German name, Baryton, may have influenced Americans to adopt the name "baritone" for the instrument, due to the influx of German musicians and instrument makers to the United States in the 19th century.
File:1894 Lyon & Healy catalog - tenor, baritone, and bass brass instruments.png|thumb|Baritone and euphonium instruments in the 1894 Lyon & Healy catalog|alt=Scanned page of an instrument catalog
By the 1890s, American euphoniums were sometimes called the B♭ bass. The 1894 Lyon & Healy catalog depicts instruments called the B♭ tenor, B♭ baritone, and B♭ bass with the same pitch and overall three-valve construction, differing only in bore and bell widths. In the 1930s, American drum and bugle corps introduced the baritone bugle in G with a single D piston valve, before a euphonium bugle in the same key but with a much wider bore had largely replaced it by the end of the 1960s.
History
The history of the euphonium is tied to the history of the tuba, which is itself the search for a practical valved bass-voiced brass instrument suitable for use in bands and orchestras. Before the invention of 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. For low-pitched brass instruments, none of these solutions were ideal; the bass trombones with slide handles were unwieldy for fast passages, and the timbre of the serpent was often criticised.The euphonium can trace its origins partly to the ophicleide, an all-metal, conical bore keyed brass instrument developed by the Paris instrument maker Jean Hilaire Asté in 1817 to extend the keyed bugle into the bass range and replace the serpent. The ophicleide improved on the serpent, in use particularly in France since the late 16th century, by using keys covering larger tone holes sized proportionally to the bore width, in their acoustically correct positions. The wide conical bore of the ophicleide, extrapolated from the keyed bugle, imparted the warm, noble timbre characteristic of the modern euphonium. The ophicleide was widely used in French and British military bands, orchestras, and the emerging civic brass band movement for several decades, even after the invention of valves, and as late as the 1870s.
The invention of valves
The invention of the Stölzel valve in 1814, the Berlin valve in 1833 used on the 1835 Baß-Tuba and Adolphe Sax's early brass instruments, and especially the modern piston valve by François Périnet in 1839, allowed the construction of brass instruments with an even sound and facility of playing in all registers. Combined with steam power and other advances in manufacturing brought about by the Industrial Revolution, this led to the 19th century becoming a time of intense transformation in brass instrument design.As early as 1829 in Berlin, the Prussian military conductor Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht required for his trumpet corps a Tenorbasshorn in B♭ with three valves, a name which was later sometimes used for the euphonium. No specimens or images survive, but the historian Clifford Bevan claims it was likely to have been a larger bore version of the Tenorhorn, later often called the Baryton.
Several instruments appeared in the 1830s and 1840s that fit the broad description of a baritone valved bugle with a wide conical bore. In Vienna, valves were applied to the ophicleide to replace its keyed tone holes, otherwise retaining its bore and shape. The larger versions of these became known as bombardons.
In 1838, Carl Wilhelm Moritz, son of Johann Gottfried Moritz, who had patented the five-valved Baß-Tuba in F in 1835, built a similar but smaller tenor tuba in B♭ with four valves. In Italy around this time, the Milan instrument maker Giuseppe Pelitti developed his bombardino with four valves based on the larger bombardone, a valved ophicleide in F. While Pelitti preferred to call his instruments Pelittone, other makers in Italy made similar instruments and called them flicorni. Built in B♭ with either three valves as flicorno bombardino or four valves as flicorno basso, they became the equivalent respectively of the modern baritone horn and euphonium.
The earliest modern euphoniums
Ferdinand Sommer, a bandmaster in Weimar, developed his Sommerophone in 1843, which was built and patented as the Euphonion by Franz Bock in Vienna the following year. In Paris at around the same time, Sax invented his family of saxhorns. Sommer toured his instrument in solo performances, and at the 1851 London Great Exhibition, presented it as both Sommerophone and Euphonion. The latter term was rapidly adopted as the anglicised euphonium, but it was the saxhorn basse en sí bemol that can be considered the earliest modern euphonium. It had a slightly narrower bore, but was often used interchangeably with the euphonium in British brass bands.Adolphe Sax's saxhorns became popular in bands in Britain and the United States due largely to the Distin family, who helped popularise the British brass band movement by promoting and performing widely on Sax's brass instruments. By 1850, Distin & Co. was manufacturing them in London, and in New York and Pennsylvania by the 1870s after the London business was purchased by Boosey & Co. The bass saxhorn also formed the basis of the six-valve French tuba in C, the standard tuba used by French composers and orchestras well into the 20th century.
In Austria-Hungary, the instrument maker Václav František Červený built his Baroxyton, a baritone instrument with four valves, in 1852. Červený developed several instrument families in ophicleide, helicon, and tuba shapes, but is especially notable for his later Kaiser instruments, with rotary valves and large conical bores. These included the Kaiserbaryton, in a distinctive oval shape. This design was quickly adopted by other makers, and has become the standard configuration for euphoniums in central and eastern Europe.
Modern instruments
With their more consistent timbre and playing facility throughout the range, and simpler fingering using three or four valves, valved brass instruments eventually led to the disappearance of the ophicleide by the end of the 19th century. In Britain, ophiceides were replaced by euphoniums, offered in competitions as prizes for winning ophicleide players.The modern "British-style" compensating euphonium was developed in the 1870s by David Blaikley, the factory manager at Boosey & Co. Blaikley, after experimenting with a three-valve compensation system, obtained a patent in 1878 for a four-valve version where the fourth valve returns the airway through the first three valves a second time, adding smaller tubing loops to rectify intonation. Similar designs were patented earlier by Gustave Auguste Besson in 1859, and Pierre-Louis Gautrot's système equitonique, found on his instruments of the period, was patented in 1864. Blaikley's compensation system was the most successful and has since been in continuous use in Britain, little-changed, on instruments by Boosey & Co., and Besson after their acquisition by Boosey & Hawkes in the mid-20th century. In 1974, the patent expired, and many euphonium manufacturers added the compensation system to their euphonium models, including Hirsbrunner, Miraphone, Sterling, Willson, and Yamaha.
Modern euphonium makers have introduced some improvements, such as tapered and wider-bore valve tubing, small adjustments to the compensation tubing to soften some of the sharp bends, and triggers for the main tuning slide. Adams developed an adjustable lead-pipe receiver for their euphoniums, which allows players to customise the timbre and responsiveness of the instrument.