Tuba

About the tuba

The tuba (Latin, "trumpet"; UK: ; US: ) 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 Baß-Tuba, pitched in 12-foot (12′) 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 16′ C and 18′ 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.

Text adapted from the Wikipedia article “Tuba”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.