Tuba
The tuba takes its name from the Latin word for trumpet, yet it sits at the opposite end of the brass family, in the bass-to-contrabass range. It is a member of the valved bugles, a wide and varied group sharing a broad conical bore. Most tubas carry four or five valves, though some makers fit three, and others six. The instrument was patented in Prussia in 1835 as the Baß-Tuba, pitched in 12-foot F, and it descended from two earlier curiosities, the serpent and the ophicleide. Why did a low brass voice take so long to arrive, and why did it then splinter into so many shapes and pitches? How did a marching adaptation end up wrapped around the body of John Philip Sousa, and how did two American-built instruments come to be called the greatest tubas ever made? The answers run through Berlin workshops, French opera pits, Civil War battlefields, and the late-night television bands of New York.
Before the first valves appeared in the 1820s, an unmodified brass instrument like the natural horn or bugle was locked to a single harmonic series. To reach more notes, makers turned to a slide, as on a trombone, or to tone holes, as on a keyed bugle or serpent. Each option failed in the bass register. Natural instruments could only manage diatonic or chromatic scales up high, the bass trombones of the day carried long unwieldy slides with handles, and the serpent's timbre was often criticized. The Paris-based maker Jean Hilaire Asté tried to solve this. In 1817 he invented the ophicleide, extending the keyed bugle into the bass with a folded, bassoon-like form. It worked well enough to spread through brass and military bands, and into French orchestras, where Hector Berlioz favored it. Soon after valves arrived, valved ophicleides followed quickly, the Ventilophikleide in Vienna, the ophicléide à piston, and in Italy the bombardone and pelittone. They kept the ophicleide's layout but swapped keys and tone holes for valves. Wide-bore versions of these were called bombardons, a name that would shadow the bass brass family for decades.
In Berlin, then part of Prussia, the military bandmaster Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht and the instrument maker Johann Gottfried Moritz received their patent on the 12th of September 1835. Wieprecht needed a secure contrabass compass for his bands, and the serpents and ophicleides already in use could not play much below C2. The Baß-Tuba was built in 12-foot F, with five Berlinerpumpen valves, forerunners of the modern Périnet pistons, giving a chromatic compass down to its pedal F. Berlin valves, which Wieprecht had invented two years earlier, suited the larger bore tubing better than the older Stölzel and Vienna designs. That made the Baß-Tuba the first successful contrabass valved brass instrument. In Paris, Adolphe Sax shared Wieprecht's ambition to sell whole families of instruments from soprano to bass. His saxhorns, pitched in E-flat and B-flat, took over French military bands and later spread to Britain and America. Their success owed much to makers who relocated, among them Gustave Auguste Besson, who moved from Paris to London, and Henry Distin, who built them in London before crossing to the United States. The saxhorns, joined by trombones, came to make up almost the entire modern British brass band. The Czech maker Václav František Červený soon added his own line, introducing his wide-bore Kaiserbass C and B-flat contrabass tubas in the early 1880s. By then Červený was among Europe's largest makers, supplying thousands of instruments to the Imperial Russian Army.
In 1838, the New York maker Allen Dodworth patented his over-the-shoulder instruments, with bells pointing backward over the player's left shoulder, including an E-flat bass model. Soldiers marching behind the band could hear the music better. Demand for bugles and these saxhorns swelled during the American Civil War in the 1860s, and tens of thousands were made at home or imported from Europe. From these ensembles grew the American drum and bugle corps tradition and the mixed-winds concert music popularized by Patrick Gilmore and John Philip Sousa. In 1893 Sousa, unhappy with his B-flat contrabass helicon tubas, asked the Philadelphia maker J. W. Pepper to build a helicon with the bell pointing upward to spread the sound. This sousaphone, nicknamed the rain catcher, was later made by Holton and C. G. Conn, who turned the bell forward in the early 20th century to create the familiar modern shape. The helicon itself, the first marching tuba, is thought to have appeared in Russia in the 1840s and was first patented in 1848 by the Vienna maker Stowasser. A Sousa Band alumnus, the Danish-born August Helleberg, became founding tubist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1891 and with the Philharmonic Society of New York in 1897. His funnel-shaped mouthpiece, later made by C. G. Conn, grew enormously popular and was widely copied.
In 1933, Alfred Johnson, 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 sound for the Philadelphia Orchestra. One eventually reached Arnold Jacobs, then a student, who became principal tubist at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and an influential pedagogue. Both instruments, the Chicago Yorks, were later bought by the orchestra and are played today by its current principal tubist, Gene Pokorny. Many American players and technicians call them the greatest tubas ever made, and they have drawn endless measurement and attempts at recreation. Replicas include the Yorkbrunner HB50 and HBS510 by the Swiss firm Hirsbrunner, now made by the Dutch maker Adams, the Yamaha YCB-826 Yamayork, the B&S 3198, and the Wessex TC-695 Chicago York. In 2009, samples from old York tubas revealed a gold brass with a high copper content of 80 percent. About 100 York-inspired tubas were built by the California producer Kanstul Musical Instruments before it closed in 2019. Italy followed a different path. The composer Giuseppe Verdi, dissatisfied with the pelittone and bombardone, commissioned a valved contrabass trombone built in the 1880s for his late operas. He and Giacomo Puccini called it simply the trombone basso, and by the early 20th century the tuba had replaced it in Italian orchestras.
The tuba is classified as a bass valved bugle, a family that also holds the euphonium, the flugelhorn, and the wider members of the saxhorn line. Their wide conical bore favors lower spectral content, producing a mellow, warm timbre, while the bell's large diameter and the wide taper of the tubing amplify the deep contrabass sound. Tubas come in four pitches, set by the open tubing length: the smaller in 12-foot F or 13-foot E-flat, the larger in 16-foot C or 18-foot B-flat. The contrabass instruments are often called CC or BB tubas, from an archaic variant of Helmholtz notation. The F tuba descends from the original 1835 Baß-Tuba and serves as a solo instrument or for higher orchestral parts, and in Vienna the Wienerkonzerttuba carries six rotary valves, three for each hand. The E-flat tuba, often called the E-flat bass, dominates brass and military bands and displaced the old British F tuba in the 1960s. The C tuba is the most widely used orchestral instrument outside Germany and Russia, always with five non-compensating valves. The B-flat contrabass is the choice in German, Austrian, and Russian orchestras, usually with rotary valves, and the most common in American schools thanks to high-school marching sousaphones. Valves themselves split into two lineages: rotary valves, patented in Prussia by Joseph Riedl in 1835, and the piston developed by François Périnet in 1839. The compensating valve, invented in the 1870s by David Blaikley of Boosey & Co. and patented in 1878, corrects intonation in the low range but makes the instrument heavier and more resistant to airflow.
The New Orleans Blue Book of ragtime standards from around 1900 carried tuba parts, but only as an alternative to the string bass, likely for outdoor playing. The tuba did not enter jazz bands until the 1920s, usually as the sousaphone playing oom-pah with short solo breaks. The earliest known jazz recordings with tuba came in 1923 with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Jelly Roll Morton on piano and Chink Martin on tuba. Poor bass sensitivity in early recording meant many string bass players doubled on tuba, among them the New York musician Joe Tarto, who recorded with Bix Beiderbecke and Tommy Dorsey and later published a method, Basic Rhythms and the Art of Jazz Improvisation. As recording improved in the 1930s, players returned to string bass, and the swing-era big bands dropped the tuba entirely. In the late 1940s the trumpeter Miles Davis brought it back into cool jazz, organizing a nine-player ensemble with Bill Barber on tuba, heard on Birth of the Cool and later on Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain. Bob Stewart's solo on the title track of Arthur Blythe's 1979 album Lenox Avenue Breakdown was called one of the few genuinely important tuba statements in jazz. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, an influx of New Orleans musicians revived the sousaphone, and in 2024 the New York tubist Marcus Rojas marveled that there were two tubas on late-night television, with Tuba Gooding Jr. in The Roots and Ibanda Ruhumbika in The Late Show Band.
The first works for solo tuba were light band pieces from the late 19th century, often polkas and trios shaped like solo cornet showpieces. Arrangements of Jean-Baptiste Arban's 1864 Variations on the Carnival of Venice are still performed and recorded. In 1945 the American composer George Kleinsinger wrote the children's play Tubby the Tuba, with narration by the lyricist Paul Tripp, which spawned recordings, a 1975 animated film, and band arrangements. The first serious solo pieces were Leonard Bernstein's Waltz for Mippy III in 1950 and Paul Hindemith's Sonate für Baßtuba und Klavier in 1955. The first tuba concerto arrived in 1954, the Concerto in F minor for Bass Tuba and Orchestra by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, still often performed today. Concertos soon followed from Gunther Schuller, William Lovelock, Edward Gregson, John Williams, Alexander Arutiunian, and Eric Ewazen, and Schuller wrote a second in 2008 for Harvey Phillips. Since 2000 the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho, Jan Bach, Philip Sparke, David Carlson, Jennifer Higdon, and the Norwegian Marcus Paus have all added to the repertoire. The newest entry, Paus's Tuba Mirum, dates from 2021, a long way from a marching instrument first wrapped under the arm in the fields of 19th-century Russia.