Tuba | Brass Instrument, History & Uses | Britannica (original) (raw)

tuba, deep-pitched brass wind instrument with valves and wide conical bore. The word tuba originally was the name of a straight-built Roman trumpet and was the medieval Latin word for trumpet. Valved bass brass instruments for bands are mentioned as early as 1829, but little is now known about them. In 1835 Wilhelm Wieprecht and Johann Gottfried Moritz of Berlin patented the bass tuba in F, with five valves. Subsequent designs were considerably influenced by the French contrabass saxhorn.

Modern military and brass band tubas are of two sizes used together: the E♭ bass (or bombardon) and the BB♭ bass, a fourth lower. When these tubas have three valves, their lowest notes are, respectively, the A below the bass staff and the E below that. The E♭ bass generally has a fourth valve that lowers the basic pitch by a fourth to BB♭, enabling the instrument (with use of valves) to produce the low E, below which the compass can be continued downward in fundamentals (lowest note producible by a length of tubing), E♭, D, and so on. These basses are coiled vertically and held upright aslant the player’s body, with the bell pointing to the right; in the United States the bell may be turned forward. Alternative designs, likewise in E♭ and BB♭ but encircling the body, include the circular bass, or helicon, with the bell resting across one shoulder, and the American sousaphone, with an extremely wide bell raised above the player’s head.

Orchestral tubas vary in different countries. Large instruments in BB♭ or a tone higher, in C, are used in the United States and parts of Europe. The original pitch of F (a tone above the E♭ bass) is preferred in Great Britain and (with rotary rather than piston valves) in Germany. All have the fourth valve and often a fifth valve tuned to a wide semitone for facilitating good intonation in certain fingerings. French orchestras use a small C tuba pitched a fifth above the F tuba. This is a six-valved development of the earlier French bass saxhorn. The military-band euphonium normally serves as a tenor tuba. Tuba parts are written at actual pitch except in brass bands, where transposed notation allows the parts to be read with cornet fingering.

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Wagner tubas are four-valved, small-bored tubas designed in the 19th century for the German composer Richard Wagner for special effects in his four-part music-drama cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. Basically derived from the French horn, they are played by horn players with horn mouthpieces and have a quieter tone colour. The bass and contrabass saxhorns in E♭ and BB♭ are also sometimes referred to as tubas.