The tuba (Latin, "trumpet"; ; ) is a large brass instrument in the bass-to-contrabass range. It is a member of the valved bugles, a large and diverse family of instruments characterized by their wide conical bore and use of valves to alter pitch. The tuba usually has four or five valves, although some models have three or six. Descending from the serpent and ophicleide, the tuba was invented in Prussia by Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht and Johann Gottfried Moritz and patented in 1835 as the , pitched in 12-foot () F. Its five valves provided a fully chromatic contrabass instrument with a deep, full contrabass timbre.
The tuba evolved through the 19th century as valves improved, and other makers contributed new designs and sizes. By the 1850s, Adolphe Sax had developed his E and B contrabass saxhorns which became standard in British brass bands, and Václav František Červený developed contrabass tubas in C and B in the 1870s. A circular, wearable tuba called the helicon was designed for marching, and by the late 1890s was adopted and modified by John Philip Sousa as the sousaphone.
The tuba is used in the symphony orchestra as the bass of the brass section, and in chamber music as the bass of the brass quintet. Tubas are standard in brass, concert, and military bands, in American marching bands and Mexican banda music (often as the sousaphone), and are occasionally used in jazz and popular music. Since the mid-20th century, the tuba has been increasingly considered as a solo instrument, and has accumulated a substantial body of chamber and solo music, as well as notable concertos by composers including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Gregson, and Kalevi Aho.
Tuba music is written at concert pitch in bass clef, except in brass bands where E♭ and B♭ tubas are written in treble clef as transposing instruments. The range of the tuba is large, due to the different sizes of instruments in use at different times and in different regional traditions. While the range from F to C (middle C) is easily accessible on any size of tuba, contemporary solo repertoire can include the pedal range to at least B and up to at least C.
A person who plays the tuba is called a tubist or tubaist, or simply a tuba player.
History
The tuba was developed to provide a low-pitched brass instrument, suitable for use in the brass sections of bands and orchestras. Before the emergence of the first valves in the 1820s, unmodified brass instruments like the natural horn or bugle were restricted to a single harmonic series. To expand the selection of notes available, either a slide (as on a trombone) or tone holes (as on a keyed bugle or serpent) were employed. Each of these options presented a problem for a low-pitched brass instrument. Natural instruments can only produce diatonic or chromatic scales in their high register, bass trombones of that era had long, unwieldy slides with handles, and the timbre of the serpent was often criticized.
Origins
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 enough of an improvement to be widely adopted in brass and military bands, and also in French orchestras, most notably by the composer Hector Berlioz.
In the 1820s, soon after the invention of valves, valved ophicleides quickly appeared (, in Vienna; , and in Italy, the or ). They had the same overall layout as the ophicleide, but were built with valves instead of keys and tone holes. Some wide-bore variants were called bombardons.
The first tubas
In Berlin, then part of Prussia, the military bandmaster Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht and the instrument maker Johann Gottfried Moritz invented the , described in their patent granted on 12 September 1835 (Prussian patent 9121). Wieprecht required an instrument capable of a secure contrabass compass for his bands, and although serpents and ophicleides were already in use, neither instrument could play much below C₂ into the contrabass range.
The Baß-Tuba was built in 12-foot () F and used five valves (forerunners of the modern Périnet piston valves) to provide a chromatic compass down to C in the pedal tone range. Berlin valves, invented by Wieprecht two years earlier, were better suited than the earlier Stölzel and Vienna valve designs for the larger bore tubing of these instruments, making the Baß-Tuba the first successful contrabass valved brass instrument.
In Paris, the 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 some popular instrument makers moving their operations, 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 saxhorns, with the addition of trombones, came to constitute almost the whole instrumentation of the modern British brass band. The modern E and B band tubas with top-action piston valves are little-changed from their 19th-century contrabass saxhorn ancestors, aside from a wider bore and the addition of a fourth compensating valve.
The first marching tuba, called the helicon, is thought to have first appeared in Russia in the 1840s, and was first patented in 1848 by the Vienna-based maker 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 became popular throughout Europe and North America, particularly for its suitability in mounted bands.
By the 1850s, the Czech maker Václav František Červený was making families of band instruments with rotary valves in Austria-Hungary, including instruments in the bass and contrabass range. He introduced his Kaiserbass C and B contrabass tubas in the early 1880s, characterized by the much wider bore still used by modern instruments. By this time, Červený was one of the largest manufacturers in Europe, supplying thousands of instruments to the Imperial Russian Army. Russian nationalist composers and others in the late Romantic and 20th century periods began writing for these tubas.
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 bandmaster Allen Dodworth (1816–1896) commissioned "over-the-shoulder" (OTS) 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 brass instruments grew, particularly in the 1860s during the American Civil War, and tens of thousands were made in the United States or imported from Europe, including contrabass saxhorns and helicons. After the war, the bands and their music remained popular, forming the basis of the American drum and bugle corps tradition, as well as the mixed-winds concert music popularized by the band leaders Patrick Gilmore and John Philip Sousa.
In 1893, Sousa had a contrabass helicon tuba built by the Philadelphia instrument maker J. W. Pepper with the bell pointing upwards, to better diffuse the sound in his concerts. This style of sousaphone, known as a "rain catcher", was later made by the American manufacturers Holton and C. G. Conn. In 1908, Conn released his "Wonderphone helicon" which turned the bell forward, to create the iconic modern sousaphone form.
An alumnus of Sousa's band, the Danish-born August Helleberg (1861–1936) was the founding tubist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1891 and with the Philharmonic Society of New York in 1897. He became renowned in his day as a member of the Sousa Band, and developed a type of tuba mouthpiece which has become popular with tuba players and widely copied by many makers.
The tuba in Italy
The Italian word is thought to be a contraction of the term (), which 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 Verdi and Giacomo Puccini called simply the trombone basso in their opera scores, had disappeared from Italian orchestras, replaced by the tuba.
The tuba in Britain and France
In Britain, the English F tuba was first produced in 1887 with five non-compensating piston valves. Harry Barlow (1870–1932) was appointed to Hallé Orchestra in 1894 and had Higham of Manchester build a tuba in F , which resides in the University of Edinburgh collection. By the 1960s these "Barlow" tubas were scarce and expensive, and importing foreign-made brass instruments was prohibited, so British orchestral players switched to the readily available brass band E tuba with four compensating valves.
From the late 19th century until around the 1950s in France, the orchestral tuba was the small French tuba built in 8′ C with six piston valves. It was based on the euphonium-sized bass saxhorn, which had been built since the 1850s. It quickly became standard in French orchestras and was the tuba used by French composers of that time. The difficult high orchestral excerpts for tuba are often from these French tuba parts. One example is the "Bydło" tuba solo in Maurice Ravel's 1922 orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, although the part descends to low F in other movements.
In the late 19th century, the saxhorn-style tubas and the wide bore rotary valve instruments popular in central Europe were usually known as bombardons, and the word tuba was mostly reserved for orchestral instruments. By the turn of the 20th century, the influence of the bombardon band instrument designs on tuba makers and players, and their infiltration into orchestras in America and Europe, meant the two terms became synonymous, and the word bombardon had largely disappeared by mid-century.
The Chicago Yorks
In 1933, Alfred "Bill" Johnson (1882–1972), 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 eventually went to Arnold Jacobs, a student at the time. Jacobs 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 eventually purchased by the orchestra, and are played 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 have been the subject of much measurement, analysis, and attempts to recreate them. Replicas include the "Yorkbrunner" HB50 and HBS510 models by the Swiss instrument company Hirsbrunner (now made by the Dutch maker Adams), the Yamaha YCB-826 "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 a "gold" brass with a high copper content of 80 percent. About 100 York-inspired tubas were built by the California-based producer Kanstul Musical Instruments before the business closed in 2019.
The tuba in jazz