The History and Future of the Tuba Family: Material-, Resonance-, and Performance-Based Perspectives
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The History and Future of the Tuba Family: Material-, Resonance-, and Performance-Based Perspectives
Published: March 20, 2024 | How to cite
Introduction
This paper proposes an examination of the intersections of materiality, acoustics, and musical performance practice through the prism of instruments of the tuba family.[*] Investigation into the symbiotic relationship between instrumental evolution and performance practice is a crucial facet of any study of timbre and orchestration. The development of musical objects to produce the sound colors demanded by aesthetic trends and compositional desires (or vice versa) has an inevitable impact upon both performance and pedagogical traditions. Gone unchecked, such transformations can easily solidify as common practices, and are soon followed unquestioningly by new generations of performers. This can result in a rarefication of the palette of timbres available to musicians, be they interested in evaluating the music of the past or exploring the music of the future.
Such a risk is particularly acute in the case of the tuba family, the least-examined subsection of the labrosones (or “brass” instruments), and as such particularly vulnerable to isolationist performance practices.[1] Such “ghettos of interest” (Wills, 1997, p. 176) are reflected in contemporary academic and performance-based practices, implying an urgent need to both propagate an understanding of, and develop a means of knowledge transfer between, the organological, acoustical, physiological, and logistical parameters which define how music is made using instruments of the tuba family. Performance-based historical organology and acoustic analysis can illuminate how an instrument’s history informs discussions concerning the sound colors available to performers and composers. An interdisciplinary critical-experimental approach to a wide range of knowledge sources—from early-nineteenth-century newspaper reports to electro-acoustic organological experimentation—can thus provide a means of examining the complex relationship that performers have with their instruments.
Attending to the above assessment, this article demonstrates how analytical processes can be applied to tuba family performance and pedagogical practices, book-ended by two diverse case studies. I first employ a combination of historical organology and practice-based research to illustrate how instruments of the tuba family that preceded the invention of the valve in around 1814 evolved as composers began adopting them into their orchestras. Audio-visual resources are then presented as a means of overcoming entrenched uncritical interpretational traditions. Following this, an overview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century appraisals of the tuba family juxtaposes the benefits provided by an acoustics- and resonance-based analysis of labrosones. This is then demonstrated in my second case study, which presents nascent findings from my ongoing experiments with electroacoustic resonant systems. These examples demonstrate how both historical and analytical organology can be used in combination with artistic research to form a rigorous, historical- and data-driven study that has the potential to have significant impact on contemporary performance practice.
Case Study 1: Orchestration for Tuba Predecessors
Over the last two centuries, while the principles of sound production have remained the same, instruments of the tuba family have undergone significant transformations in terms of overall physical form and construction, mechanisms for pitch alteration, and resonant capabilities. By detailing the processes that facilitated these transformations alongside contemporaneous literature and repertoire, we can observe how and why various instruments were employed by both performers and composers. Meanwhile, audio-visual documentation can illuminate how performances of associated repertoire evolved in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century practices. Such resources can therefore be used to inform musicians as to what tools and skills are needed to further develop their music making in manners that benefit their relationships with their instruments, as well as their ability to authentically interpret the timbral desires of composers. This process is evident in the orchestral use of low-pitched labrosones that immediately preceded the invention of the tuba: the serpent and the bass horn. By the turn of the nineteenth century, forms of bass trombone and contrabassoon were able to produce pitches matching those of the double bass of the string family, yet they were unable to create similarly strong timbral resonances in their lower registers. The serpent and bass horn grew in popularity through an awareness that creation of the lowest “contrabass” aerophone resonances (at a time when such terms generally referred to relative timbre rather than pitch as is commonplace today) resulted not (only) from the length of the resonant tube, but its bore diameter and overall geometry.[2] The exploration, execution, and refinement of this theory would define how these labrosones rapidly gained in popularity as they found employment in first ecclesiastical, then military, and eventually orchestral and operatic settings.
By the late seventeenth century, the serpent was in widespread use in France (Dompiner, Langlois, and Mailhot, 2013, p. 64), where the powerful fundamental frequencies resulting from its wide, conical bore made it an effective support for plainchant singing (Houstiou and le Conte, 2013, pp. 138–40). Its prevalence is reflected in contemporary composers’ specific demands for the instrument in scores, as seen in Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Offerte pour l‘orgue et pour les violons, flûtes et hautbois (ca. 1685), it being noted that “we can be sure that it [the serpent] was readily available, and therefore that it may have been used more often in Charpentier's works than the single reference in the autographs suggest” (Thompson, 1997, p. 162). Charpentier’s Offerte also takes the serpent beyond mere support of voices, a development also found in Jean-Baptiste Matho’s Arion (1714), which requires two serpents for some instrumental sections, and works by Sébastien de Brossard, such as his Symphonie pour la graduel (ca. 1688) (Houstiou, 2015, p. 210). Meanwhile, in England, John Eccles’s music for William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1694–96) uses the serpent to “emulate the jerky movements thought to be characteristic of witches dancing” (Eccles et al, 1696/2004, p. viii) while in his Rinaldo and Armida (1698), it is indicated in the stage directions to be “play[ed] softly under the stage” to “represent the brewing tempest of Armida’s vengeance” (Eccles, 1698/2011, pp. 61, xvi) although without notational suggestions as to what this might entail. Four of Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s church cantatas, written in 1736–37 for the court of Sondershausen (which had acquired a serpent in 1730), specify a basso serpentini or basso serpendini, yet the instrument is primarily used to support the basso continuo line of the organ (Klaus, 2013, p. 158).[3]
Ernst Ludwig Gerber wrote in 1803 that the serpent was introduced into German military bands “roughly thirty years earlier” (Gerber, 1803, col. 19), which appears to pinpoint accurately when these instruments were first found in such organizations across Europe, and thus made known to a wider audience of composers. In England, serpent parts from William Abington and Samuel Wesley date from 1777, and military band serpentists are recorded from 1785 (Bevan, 2000, p. 98). The instrument was found in military bands in France from at least 1795 (Palmer, 1990, p. 142),[4] in Russia by the mid-eighteenth century (Matvejčuk, 2019, p. 91),[5] and in Austria from the end of the eighteenth century (Nagy, 1985, p. 57). However, there is nothing to suggest that composers had any working knowledge of the instrument, with works even from those well known for their innovative instrumentation such as Joseph Haydn (Marches for the Derbyshire Regiment (Hob. VIII:1–2), 1794), Ludwig van Beethoven (Military March (WoO 24), 1816), and Luigi Cherubini (Pas Redoublés et Marches, 1816), reflecting that it was being used only because it was part of the instrumentation available. In Haydn’s works, for example, while occasionally forming the base of a three-part harmony with the bassoons, the serpent is generally used to double the second bassoon in octaves or unison (Yeo, 2015, p. 265), a tradition that would be sustained as the instrument began to find use in orchestral ensembles.
The serpent was found in Parisian orchestras shortly after their founding in the 1770s, with existing repertoire suggesting that it was used to invoke religious overtones, as seen in François-Joseph Gossec’s hymne des sacrificateurs (which accompanied Jean Racine’s Athalie in 1785) (Audéon, 2013, p. 267), and in Henri-Montan Berton’s Montano et Stéphanie (1799) where it is separated from the bassoons only in the marche religieuse. Hector Berlioz only included the serpent in religious contexts—Messe solennelle (1825) and the Dies Irae in Symphonie Fantastique (1830)—although he described its “barbarous quality of tone” as being “suited better to the rites of Druid cults than those of the Catholic religion” (Berlioz, 1844, p. 230), while Fanny Hensel included a serpent in a mythological context in Hero und Leander (1831) in order to “heighten musical tension” (Todd, 2010, p. 161). Felix Mendelssohn’s Overtüre: Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt (1828), Symphony No. 5 Reformation (1832), and Paulus (1836) (the latter two again evoking religious connotations) require the serpent and contrabassoon to read from the same part, a combination perhaps suggesting that he thought them to belong to the same instrumental family. Wagner’s serpent writing also leads one to believe that it could be “treat[ed] […] as a third bassoon” (Bevan, 1997, p. 150), with his writing going notably lower than the serpent’s commonly accepted range. Such a discrepancy is potentially due to a transposition mistake, as the French ton de chapelle (pitch for churches, where serpents were still commonly found) lay two semitones lower than the ton d’orchestre at the time (Haynes, 2002, pp. 369–70; Overton, 1985, pp. 40–42). In any case, Wagner’s complex fast chromatic writing implies that he was unaware of the instrument’s inherent acoustic limitations.[6]
By the late eighteenth century, keys were being added to serpents to aid in chromatic pitch production (for example, see Figure 2). To improve ergonomics and structural stability, serpents were also now being built in upright form (with a single U- of V-shaped bend in the tube), instruments known today as bass horns. The creation of the earliest such serpent droit is credited to J. J. Régibo in 1789, and other variations included the serpent Forveille (largely in metal with a wooden bell and bottom bow) and basson russe (in wood, often with a dragon-head metal bell).[7] Gottfried Streitwolf’s Chromatisches Basshorn (in wood with mostly keyed holes and a metal bell) was advertised as “serving to support the wind section in our orchestras” (Heinroth, 1820, col. 688), a role these military instruments may indeed have undertaken, although the S-shaped serpent (commonly known by this time in France without keys as a serpent d’église, and with keys as a serpent ordinaire) was also still commonly found (Palmer, 1990, p. 137).[8] Terminology appears to have been left vague enough to allow performance using any associated instrument, with one form or another of bass horn commonly found in German orchestral practice until around 1830 (Schreiber, 1938, p. 177), although in his Nocturno in 1826, Felix Mendelssohn specifies an “English” bass horn (all metal, with three keys) owing to its presence in the Bad Doberan band who commissioned the piece. He then included it in his overture to Ein Sommernachtstraum (1827), although it does not feature in the first draft of the score. A more defined instrumental practice can be traced in Italy, where the serpent was found in 1816 at the theaters of San Carlo (Naples) and La Scala (Milan) (Meucci, 2013, p. 287; Koury, 1986, p. 142).[9] Scores from this period, such as that of Gioachino Rossini’s Armida (1817), refer to a serpentone, a name which, by around this time, pertained to a form of bass horn commonly known by the abbreviated portmanteau cimbasso (i.e., corno [c.] in basso) (Meucci, 1996, p. 145). Some composers adopted this name, but with little consistency: Gaetano Donizetti in Parisina (1833) employed gimbasso,[10] while in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma (1831), the description of a tromboncino is unclear.[11] Ever since, the term has been broadly used as “everyday musicians’ jargon” to refer to a wide variety of instruments (ibid., see also below).
Tone-holes function as high-pass filters, the frequency of which, in a simplified manner, is determined by the ratio between the diameter of the hole and that of the tube (Campbell, Gilbert, and Myers, 2021, pp. 160–64). As a result, a hole which can be covered by a fingertip will have a limited effect on a wide-bore tube such as a serpent, as compared with, for example, a cornetto or recorder. To retain the wide, conical bore profile required to create a contrabass timbre but improve the reliability of intonation and tonal control, it was therefore necessary to develop a means of increasing the hole size proportionally with the bore size. Keys would eventually be used to cover all bass horn tone-holes, most notably employed in Jean Hilaire Asté (more commonly known as Halary)’s 1817 invention, the ophicleide.[12] Unlike the cimbasso and other military bass horns which were primarily characterized by vernacular traditions, the ophicleide was quickly recognized as a valuable addition to the orchestra, being found at the Opéra de Paris by 1819, and written for by many composers preparing (or hoping) for premieres in Paris, including Gioachino Rossini, Guiseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner. Outside of France, however, it was generally only used as a replacement for earlier instruments. Italian ophicleide references date from 1825 (Asioli, 1825, p. 9), with parts by Cesare Pugni published in 1831–32 (Meucci, 1996, p. 149), but it was commonly used interchangeably with the cimbasso. In England by 1837, the ophicleide had “been lately introduced into [the] orchestras,” although “not […] into the theatre or the concert-room,” while the serpent “is still used in very great orchestras” (Hogarth, 1837).[13] Most German and Austrian composers may have been “unaware of the ophicleide’s existence” (Bevan, 1997, p. 145), yet an example is recorded as being in use at the Hofkapelle in Darmstadt from 1819 (Reuter, 2002, p. 470), and instruments built across the Austro-Germanic states exist to this day. Ophicleides from Georg Saurle of Munich, for example, were of use to the local Court Opera, who “between ca. 1825–45 […] could fall back on the ophicleide players of the Munich regimental bands to perform contrabassoon parts (Haydn’s The Creation [1799] etc.) without any problems” (Tremmel, 1993, p. 32).[14] Thus, while the instrument was indeed found in orchestras of the Germanic states, England, and Italy, it was used as a “modern” serpent, and once more as part of the bassoon section, and not, as in France, as an orchestral instrument in its own right. It took the invention of the valve in 1814 to enable development of orchestral low-pitched labrosones outside of France, with the earliest such instruments emerging in the mid-1830s in Vienna and Berlin (Adler-McKean, 2022, pp. 118–122).
Performance and Pedagogy Today, and the Role of Audio-Visual Resources
This brief overview presents a series of distinct time- and location-specific orchestral employments of various forms of serpent and bass horn, establishing contexts and knowledge bases upon which performers can ground their own interpretations. This approach is, however, in contradiction to the self-determined nature of contemporary orchestral tuba performance practice. For today’s orchestral tubists, choosing one’s instrument is firmly in one’s own hand; this is independent not only of the particular instrument of the tuba family a historical composer may have composed for and the national or local practices that may have been in place when and where the music was written (the tubist likely to be aware of neither), but also of any instrument that a composer today might desire.[15] This can lead to conclusions that an analysis of such a choice is of little relevance, as demonstrated here by Harvey Phillips and William Winkle (1992):
“The lack of a common nomenclature or definitive identification of the many designs, bore sizes, and configurations of low brass instruments produced by the different manufacturers between 1830 and 1900 has caused considerable confusion among both composers and performers. To this day, there are often differing opinions as to precisely what specific instrument any given composers may have intended for a particular composition. Fortunately, today’s tubist, with the modern instruments available to [them], is capable of meeting the challenges presented by the various compositions of the period” (p. 8).
While codified nineteenth-century orchestral tuba family practices are indeed rarely encountered (although not due to “differing opinions,” but rather rapid instrumental developments such as those mentioned earlier, and incomplete primary source research and terminological ambiguities as will be detailed later), it is dangerous to assume that compositions for these assorted instruments can be automatically recreated effectively using modern instruments. An alternative perspective, here regarding the flute family, is proposed by Bruce Haynes (2007):
“The instruments of one period are not “better” in some absolute sense than their counterparts in other periods. The traverso […] is not “better” than the Boehm flute except in one way: it is much easier to play eighteenth-century music in eighteenth-century style on an eighteenth-century instrument” (p. 152).
Rather than viewing new instruments as superior substitutes for weaker predecessors, Haynes suggests that older instruments can be viewed more stylistically appropriate than their modern successors at playing the music written for them. This approach requires recognition of the specific connections between instruments and repertoire, an awareness which, as outlined above by Phillips and Winkle, is clearly lacking in tubists. The extent to which relationships can be proven between an instrument and a particular location, composer, or work vary dramatically, but without trying to assert any supposed historical accuracy or authenticity, it is possible to use audio-visual media to demonstrate timbral differentiation between instrumental archetypes. Compromises are always necessary, as is the nature of any resource production involving human participation, but nevertheless, best practices can be followed to ensure the maximum efficacy of the resulting material. For example, with respect to acoustic constraints, Gunter Ziegenhals (2010) noted that “it is necessary to keep the influencing factors of the room, test piece, and musician constant in order to distinguish between instruments,” and also that, with regard to trumpet assessments, the influence of the test piece, acoustic, and musician dominates over instrument (pp. 148, 153).[16] This suggests that as long as inconsistent acoustic circumstances can be accounted for, it is possible to make fair assessments of labrosones by keeping the performer constant, and selecting appropriate repertoire.
Serpents and bass horns are largely inaccessible to tuba students, and so, contemporary assessments of historical tuba performance practice tend to rely upon second- or third-hand judgements, treating the instruments as dead artefacts (Morgan, 2006). Despite a lack of first-hand experience, many argue for their substitution with modern instruments (Demy, 2014; Kleinsteuber, 2017; Peterson, 2018), in a similar fashion to derogatory descriptions written of the serpent after it had fallen out of common use (Hofmann, 1897, p. 51; Prout, 1897, p. 242; Teuchert, 1911, p. 116; Westrup, 1927). Carse (1965), however, also writing before the late-twentieth-century serpent “revival” (Bevan, 2000, p. 119) noted that:
“When anyone now picks up an old serpent […] the sounds issuing from it will most likely provoke either laughter or else amazement that such a contrivance could ever have been used for musical purposes; when the player is not used to the instrument, does not understand the necessary lip technique, knows nothing about its tone-character, and perhaps expects it to sound like a tuba or trombone, the serpent is all the less likely to do itself justice” (p. 274).
Awareness of serpents and bass horns has grown exponentially in recent decades, with instruments being made across the world and performed by an increasing number of prominent musicians, although critical perspectives are not yet universal. Even in the context of expert organological study, practical advice can resort to uncritical assumptions. Arnold Myers (2013), in an otherwise analytically rigorous article, states that “the ideal tuba for ensemble playing would have the widest practicable bore” (p. 173), without describing what sort of tuba is in question, or indeed why such an “ideal” tuba should be sought after. Pioneering labrosone researcher Herbert Heyde includes references to “the typical dullness of the serpent’s sound” (2015, p. 26), describes the sound of one valved ophicleide as “dull, covered, and a bit musty” (1980, p. 63) and another as “not having the sound of a tuba” (ibid., p. 69). Renato Meucci’s groundbreaking study on the cimbasso (1996) concludes, in a one-page reflection on “the performance of cimbasso parts,” that a modern F tuba should be used for almost all works, and that ultimately “we should trust […] the good sense of the performer” (pp. 161–62). Performance-based resources, even when compromised by the highly ambiguous nature of serpent and bass horn employment in the early nineteenth-century orchestra, can help contextualize such historical and empirical studies by strengthening the development of such “good senses,” and providing a means of broadening the reach of critical approaches to tuba family performance practice.
To take one work as an example, in his Symphony No. 5 Reformation, Felix Mendelssohn assigns the serpent and contrabassoon to the same part (“Contrafagotto e Serpente”). Campbell (2002) argues that these will balance well owing to the wide bore of the serpent enabling significantly stronger production of lower spectral content than found with the contrabassoon whose fundamental pitches are an octave lower.[17] My experience recording this work resulted in balance difficulties between the serpent and a modern contrabassoon, and so for the following concert performances, I swapped to ophicleide, an instrument more capable of producing stronger resonances in the lower register. However, this option is not available to most tubists; substitution with any modern tuba would either dramatically overpower the lower woodwind section (a significant majority the part is marked forte or fortissimo) or require a level of dynamic restraint that would negate the production of any brighter spectral material. An awareness of these sound colors could stimulate a search for a different instrument or uses of other technology (for example, a baritone horn, euphonium, and/or perhaps using some form of mute) to avoid today’s common practice solution, which is to have the part performed by contrabassoon alone.
Limitations on contemporary orchestral tuba performance practice are imposed by a combination of pedagogical background and the retention of post-war tradition, as new orchestral players are selected largely for their ability to emulate their predecessor. Tuba students at a tertiary level are limited to studying exclusively with current or former orchestral tubists, whose institutionalized mid-twentieth-century performance practice traditions and instrumental choices are determined largely by geographic or linguistic boundaries. Other constraints are minimal, given that tuba-family instruments are relatively inexpensive (especially for state-supported music colleges, symphony orchestras, and opera houses), yet instrumental explorations are extremely rare. Tuba predecessors with holes and/or keys require additional practice, but tubists are rather encouraged to invest their time mastering music using only the instruments that happen to be to hand.[18] Not only do these instruments often bear little relation to those upon which the music was originally played but are also often more technically challenging. Arnold Jacobs, “rightfully called the father of modern orchestral tuba playing” (Taylor, 1999, p. 6), notoriously played Bydlo from Ravel’s orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition (1922) on a B-flat tuba, an instrument whose nominal tube length is over twice that of the French C tuba for which it was written. While the work is playable with this tuba, it requires greater technical skill as one is forced to use considerably higher overtones, and at times exceed the bell cut-off frequency (Campbell, Greated, and Myers, 2004, p. 10), creating a notably different timbre while also significantly lowering pitch stability. This is not an isolated incident; for example, Alexei Lévachkine (n.d.) writes:
“Amongst the Russian tuba players, it became a tradition to always strive to perform all parts that are written for various types of tubas on a B-flat contrabass instrument. Many, with varying success, managed these “acrobatic” stunts, which were often provoked by conductors.”
Jacobs himself, meanwhile, said that:
“Intelligence should not be diverted inwards (in the terms of analysis): put the priority on the musical idea. There must be many well-defined sounds in the brain in order to produce musical sounds” (Little, 1999, p. 14).
While it is certainly laudable to promote a musicality-based approach to performance practice, to realize the wishes of a composer of historical music (that is, where the composer themselves is not alive), an awareness of appropriate contexts is vital. Otherwise, by suggesting that there is no worth in prioritizing the “inward” analytical contexts that surround a piece of music, any influences on the processes of interpretation are limited to the immediate experiences that surround any performer and/or performance. Dedication to “acrobatic stunts” is rooted in pursuits of technical virtuosity that arose in labrosone performance practice following the invention of the valve. This development demoted the register limitations and requisite malleability of timbre that, for centuries, were crucial to scoring for “natural” trumpets and horns. The new valved instruments were able to intonate precisely in the high register using the shortest (and therefore most stable) harmonic series and play fully chromatically in the middle and lower registers. This capability enabled previously unimaginable speeds of articulation across large, tonally consistent ranges.[19] While military movements grew in influence and encouraged competition between the various families of the valved instruments that they had adopted, these pursuits only increased in popularity. As ever-larger band instruments began entering the orchestra, a crossover in practice was inevitable, despite the contrast with instruments used by orchestral musicians one or two generations earlier. As early as 1882, Karl Emil von Schafhäutl likened the difference between the serpent and Červený’s Kaiserbass instruments (the direct predecessor to many models of tuba popular today), to that between Mozart’s keyboard instruments and “our modern giants” (Schafhäutl, 1882, col. 879). Kelsick (2021)’s “historical perspective” discussion regarding performance of Wagner’s Ein Faust-Overtüre (1839) disregards the fact that the lower labrosone part was written for a serpent (although it was almost certainly premiered using a tuba, see above), knowledge which has been widely available since 1986.[20] The effect of modern labrosones on contemporary practice is under discussion by some (Wills, 1997, pp. 175–176; Bevan, 2000, pp. 488–489), but the impact of such debates can only be supported and deepened via audio-visual material, both using the instruments themselves, and juxtapositions with performances on instruments that could plausibly be employed for the respective parts today.
Audio-visual resources I have produced to this end include excerpts from Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 Reformation performed using a serpent, his overture to Ein Sommernachtstraum with an English bass horn, Bellini’s Norma with an “early” cimbasso,[21] and Rossini’s Le Siège de Corinthe with an ophicleide. I have also produced comparative examples with commonly-used modern instruments, for example, Mendelssohn’s music with a euphonium, Wagner’s music with a variety of modern tubas, and Verdi’s music with a “Verdi” (valved bass trombone) cimbasso.[22] While demonstrating the extent to which modern instruments can recreate the sound of their predecessors, such comparisons also show how concepts of timbre have evolved since these works were first performed and the extent to which this evolution varies, depending on geographical location, contemporaneous nomenclature, and pedagogical tradition. These comparisons can thereby provide options for interpretation that allow for the possibility of experimentation in performance and a basis for musicological debate on historically informed performance practice. At the broadest level, these recordings will find their greatest impact when placed in the context of the ensemble with which they are working, or at least with the other labrosones. While still relatively rare, historically informed ensembles specializing in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century repertoire are growing in number.[23] These recordings, alongside similar material that I have produced for other historical tuba family members, can aid musicians interested in developing critical performance practice perspectives on this repertoire, whether they have access to historical instruments or are looking to develop their practice on modern tubas.
Assessing the Tuba Family: Assumption and Guesswork
Through production of comparative recordings between old and new instruments, I was able to highlight how similar modern tubas sound to each other, in contrast to the diversity of timbres encountered with earlier instruments. The tuba family is not alone in this situation; even when only considering labrosones, the conglomeration of multi-national manufacturing companies, combined with the internationalization of performance practice has led to an ever-more homogenized range of instruments, or as Simon Wills (1997) writes, “in the late twentieth century, sameness is triumphant” (p. 175). This trend has had an inevitable impact upon the range timbral resources made available to composers and performers. Since the mid-twentieth-century hegemony of current tuba family instruments was established, composers, authors, and tubists themselves have frequently failed to take advantage of the instruments’ sonic capabilities.[24] I will present here an alternative approach, suggesting how informed perspectives of music creation and performance can be enabled by breaking down and analyzing sonic resources based upon their acoustic components. This will then be exemplified in a case study illustrating my on-going experimentation with a novel electro-acoustic extension to the tuba’s resonant system, the feedback tuba.
Figure 11: Lowest pitches of valved low-pitch labrosone according to literature published 1837–2022.
Orchestration manuals published since 1945 refer to the tuba family in terms that vary from generic to misleading. This trend of misinformation is illustrated in Figure 11, which plots the parameter of lowest possible pitch in regular usage (as given by the author of a particular manual) against the year of the publication. This chart shows how, following a wide diversity of lowest pitches described by authors up until the mid-twentieth century, such writings have since converged around a median pitch of D1.[25] This is not because of any codification or propagation of knowledge—the instrument’s 1835 patent states a lowest pitch of C1 (Wieprecht and Moritz, 1835, Figure VII), and lower pitches have been employed by some since the 1920s (Berg, 1925/1955, II: bar 344)—but rather owing to their assumptions that contemporaneous practices accurately reflect the organological and acoustic properties of the instruments they are describing. Piston (1969), for example, believed that the tuba had only been in use since 1875, a theory which was then repeated in Adler (2002). Value judgments are also frequently encountered, particularly in terms of timbre. For example, with regard to tuba mutes—regularly employed by composers such as Richard Strauss (Ein Heldenleben (1899)), Arnold Schoenberg (Gurre-Lieder (1913)), and Igor Stravinsky (Le sacre du printemps (1913))—it has been written in recent decades that they are “clumsy affairs and may well be out of tune” (Del Mar, 1981, p. 314), that they “render the timbre thin, nasal and distant” (Stiller, 1985, p. 92), and that they produce “a dry, empty tone of little attraction” (Campbell, Greated, and Myers, 2004, p. 185). Kunitz (1968) is the first publication to specifically address contemporaneous tuba performance practice, which provides broadly accurate organological and acoustic fundamentals, but overlooks most instrumental practices and repertoire outside of the German-speaking world, and also states many assumptions as fact without providing sources, notably the oft-cited yet erroneous belief that the instrument known today as contrabass tuba was invented by Václav František Červený in 1845.[26] Today, this text is outdated in terms of methodology and level of rigor, and yet, its continued existence as the only reference work dedicated to orchestral tuba performance practice results in its continued citation in reference literature (Ünlü, 2006, p. 57).
Such texts are in stark contrast to earlier generations’ thorough, pan-traditional writings on the tuba family, from Hector Berlioz’s initial assessments in French, through Franz Ludwig Schubert’s multiple texts in German, to Ebenezer Prout’s extensive descriptions in English, among many others (Berlioz, 1844, p. 229; Schubert 1862, pp. 96–98; Schubert, 1865; Schubert, 1866, pp. 70–72; Prout, 1897, pp. 234–39). One cannot assert causal connection between these texts and the instrument-specific writing produced by composers of the time,[27] but it is possible to observe a comparable relationship between the manner of writings on the tuba family from the second half of the twentieth century, and the employment of the instruments by composers of the same era. The post-war modernist generation pushed the aesthetic and technical boundaries of labrosones beyond those of the mid to late nineteenth century for the first time, but utilization of the tuba suffered from fundamental misunderstandings with regard to the diversity of instruments and their individual technical capabilities, even from composers otherwise known for their skill in orchestration and astute handling of lesser-known instruments. In Prometeo (1981–85), Luigi Nono demands pitched “aeolian” (air) sounds, and Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1998–99) includes microtonal tuning, both of which are impossible to create in the manner they desire, not because of performance practice limitations, but because of the fundamental acoustic properties of the tuba (Adler-McKean, 2020, pp. 86–103). Other composers, wary of the unknown, limit their scope: Pierre Boulez’s 37-note tuba part in Cummings ist der Dichter (1986) is not anomalous in his writing for the instrument, while at the other extreme, the significant tuba part in Wolfgang Rihm’s Jagden und Formen (1995/2008), is nevertheless simple in comparison with the demands made on every other instrument in the ensemble.[28] Helmut Lachenmann’s concerto Harmonica (1981/83) demonstrates perhaps a more nuanced and thorough awareness of the tuba than observed in any work before or since, but in his more recent Concertini (2005), his assumption that the tuba has the same harmonic structure as the trombone results in multiphonics that are not possible on any model of tuba, and therefore require substitution with another technique such as simultaneous singing and playing with flutter-tongue (see Figure 12). Such parts generally arise only following rare instances when a tubist happens to present in the ensemble for which the music was being written. Nevertheless, they also demonstrate that tubists often cannot comprehensively define, or, at least, communicate their working relationship with their instrument in such a manner to enable composers to fully and effectively utilize the instrument’s sonic potential in their compositions.
Figure 12: Helmut Lachenmann, Concertini (2005), b. 373–376.
In these and countless other recent instances of the tuba being acoustically misunderstood or otherwise technically mishandled, one could reasonably argue that a significant responsibility ought to be borne by the premiering tubist of any new work that includes the instrument. In 1846, Richard Wagner wrote to his director at the Königlich-sächsische musikalische Kapelle in Dresden to suggest that a tuba player be hired who could also play double bass, owing to his frustration from working with military bandsmen that were untrained in orchestral performance practice (Aringer, 2013, pp. 279–280). Nevertheless, such bandsmen were frequently used by orchestras well into the mid-twentieth century; Bevan notes that “tubists at the time [he] began [his] career in the late 1950s consist[ed] principally of a series of ex-military bandsmen who … rarely talked, and whose playing was mainly inaudible,” later describing a teacher as “the last of the non-playing tuba players” (Bevan, 2000, p. 391). Over the last half century, however, following the rapid introduction of military instruments into the previously rarefied realm of orchestral labrosone practice, this situation has changed dramatically. The majority of major symphony and opera orchestras have at least one full-time tubist, and tuba professors can be found at pedagogical institutions across the world. Tubists today are therefore in privileged positions of being able to work directly with composers and aid them in their writing; 69% of composers surveyed in 2019 who had written for the tuba family had consulted an instrumentalist directly (Hynds, 2019, p. 41). To provide composers with the information required for them to fully utilize the tuba within their sound-worlds, the tubist needs to be able to answer questions regarding their instruments’ organological development (Why are your tubas in these pitches? What do these valves and slides do?), acoustic properties (How are sounds made? How can you control them?), and technical capabilities (Can you make this sound? If not, is it physically impossible, or does it require more practice?). In practice, however, such questions (and their corresponding answers) are often highly specific and not generalizable. Composers often work with specific musicians, but collaborations can result in idiosyncratic parts that are designed to fit the capabilities of a certain instrumentalist rather than an instrument, with results ranging from Nono’s combination of tuba, euphonium, and alto trombone for Prometeo which very few musicians are both willing and able to take on, to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Concerto for Bass Tuba (1955), where the original soloist convinced the composer to remove the highest pitches from the cadenza that he was struggling to produce (Gourlay, n.d., p. 6).[29] Contexts are also often missing: Vinko Globokar writes valve combinations in Juriritubaïoka (1997) that, owing to the instrument’s mechanics, refer only to the (unspecified) model of tuba for which the piece was written. When learning this piece myself, I needed to erase these markings and find my own solutions to creating the desired effect, a process which other tubists may not be willing to go through. Similar consequences can be observed through the tubist-composers who have specialized in writing music for themselves, notably Melvyn Poore, Robin Hayward, Aaron Hynds, and Gérard Buquet. In any case, given the self-determined nature of contemporary tuba practice, knowledge of organological and acoustic contexts is essential to prevent works only ever being performable by that single, individual tubist.
Practice-Based Applications of Acoustic and Organological Study
Didactic and analytical texts on labrosone performance practice rely heavily upon haptic feedback. Without an external resonant membrane, players depend upon their own lips for resonance propagation, which are hidden behind opaque metal, and require the finest of muscular control to interact with the resonant structure of the instrument. Awareness of sensory feedback is therefore of significant importance,[30] yet, by prioritizing this approach to the detriment of all others, particularly of acoustic awareness, value judgments easily become commonplace, such as false dichotomies of “conventional” and “alternative” methods of sound production (Burba and Hübner, 2019, pp. 19, 55), deeming certain techniques to be “extended” (Herbert, 2019), and categorizing some “sound effects” as “special” (Svoboda and Roth, 2017, pp. 65–68). While undoubtedly a broader issue in Western instrumental practice, labrosone pedagogy is particularly entrenched in tradition; for example, much as double stopping, sul ponticello, and col legno are not string “extended techniques,” neither are multiphonics, air sounds, or vocalizations for labrosones. The tuba, as the youngest member of this grouping, is both under-explored and ill-defined, which places it in a particularly precarious position.
Since Kunitz (1968), some attempts to codify tuba performance practice have been undertaken, though often, those who tackle the subject are tubists who focus primarily on their own individual practice. This can result in writings which are effective at describing the author’s personal approach but are of limited relevance to others. For example, almost a third of Buquet (1993) is devoted to analysis of one of the author’s own compositions, while Cummings (2004) is written solely with reference to works written for the author.[31] Meanwhile, Larson (2013) includes “changes in tempo” and “extreme range changes” under the bracket of “experimentalism,” as well as glissando (found in Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (1895)) and flutter tongue (found in Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces (1909)). Narrow contextual awareness risks prevention of any future “experimentalism” by not explaining the acoustic implications of such developments, be they glissandos in the context of lip resonant frequency modulation, or flutter-tongue in the context of formant modulation (Adler-McKean, 2020, pp. 107–08, 129–31). Hynds (2019) contains more up-to-date technical information, but historical contexts are based upon secondary sources, and thus do not address the performance implications of modern instrumental practice. By perpetuating a narrative that modern instruments are the direct linear successors to those of the early nineteenth century, contemporary exploration can appear disassociated from “traditional” instrumental employment, and thus create a divide between those who feel comfortable experimenting with their instrument, thanks to knowledge of how and why it is employed, and those who do not.
Yeo (2021) contains thorough organological research, but does not carry this rigor across to acoustic phenomena, stating that “the science of acoustics is complex and beyond the scope of this volume,” and that he does not wish to engage with “detailed scientific description[s],” instead favoring entries on vernacular descriptions of haptic processes, such as “back pressure,” “false note,” and “natural slur” (pp. 102, 68, 15, 56, 95).[32] This approach, frequently seen in recent literature, limits the text’s ability to comprehensively describe acoustic functions. It is common knowledge that a labrosone’s high register is defined by the musician and musical context rather than the instrument: “the actual possible playing range […] varies greatly from player to player and according to the dynamic” (Svoboda and Roth, 2017, p. 28; emphasis in original), and the upper register requires “a certain amount of pressure against the lips” (Miller, 2015, p. 111). Nevertheless, acoustic studies show that each instrument has a bell cut-off frequency, beyond which the harmonic structure of the instrument no longer functions. Passing this threshold makes extreme demands on embouchure stamina, which destabilizes pitch accuracy and limits control of dynamic and timbre (Adler-McKean, 2020, p. 60). Loud cuivré dynamics are also commonly discussed, described by Hill as “more a color than a technique” (Hill, 1996, p. 55). However, once again, awareness of the underlying acoustic phenomenon, non-linear sound propagation, is required in order to explain why these sounds have their particular characteristics, and how they can be controlled in manners that allow for a wide variety of timbral applications rather than the prevailing non-critical implementation, that is, to be played as loud as possible (Adler-McKean, 2020, pp. 66–67).[33] Incomplete descriptions of these functions both limit the potential employment of these techniques by composers, and also have significant pedagogical implications on performance practice. A tangible recognition as to why one note is more difficult to play than another a semitone lower, or why, for the same pitch, one valve combination produces a different timbre than another, can greatly enhance the processes involved in being able to create these sounds confidently and reliably.
An example of a situation that can arise when acoustic properties are not fully considered can be observed in the case of Just Intonation. Sabat and Hayward (2006) outline how “tunable intervals” can be created with labrosones by means of valves tunings. However, this paper did not consider the inherent “inharmonicity” of labrosones, owing to the curvature and varying bore of the tubing, and the nature of tube resonances such that they occur over bands of frequencies rather than at individual modal points, meaning that pitches can deviate significantly from any specific theoretical locations (Campbell, Greated, and Myers, 2004, p. 151). It is therefore neither possible to define a valve combination and harmonic and expect a microtonally accurate pitch to be produced, as in Stefan Pohlit’s M/S “Barış Manço” (2018), which includes a cent deviation next to every pitch, nor to prescribe attempts at scordatura through valve tuning, as in Wolfgang von Schweinitz’s Plainsound-Sinfonie (2003–05), which requires that the solo tuba be detuned by an undecimal quarter-tone (ca. 53.3 cents).[34] The microtonal tuba system can alleviate such difficulties, but research on the topic so far has approached its implementation from primarily theoretical perspectives (Hayward, 2011). Many standard valve tunings can make fair approximations of a quarter-tone scale (Wallace, 2019b), and if pitch deviations smaller than these or absolute accuracy of microtonal articulation are not compositional parameters, specification of the microtonal system can hinder the reach of new compositions beyond the few tubists with access to this instrument, an issue which, as discussed earlier, is already commonly found in contemporary tuba repertoire.
The performance and compositional implications of basing analyses on haptic feedback stretch across many sonic resources which are defined by the harmonic structure of the instrument. When describing how multiphonics (referred to here as “split tones”) are created, Hynds (2019) writes:
“Split tones are generated by modifying the lips in a way that allows for multiple harmonic partials to be activated through the buzz. This is primarily achieved by allowing the buzz to be loosened to the point of moving to the lower partial of a particular harmonic series. However, instead of allowing the lips to settle on the lower note, the performer instead hold the lips at the “break point” between the two partials” (p. 140).
From the perspective of the performer, this description may accurately reflect how the process of creating multiphonics feels, but this approach can lead to misunderstandings. There is no “‘break point’ between the two partials,” but rather the lip resonance frequency is destabilized to a point where the lips attempt to “occupy two or more resonance nodes at the same time” (Svoboda and Roth, 2017, p. 111). Rather than being produced at a point between two notes where they can sound simultaneously (or where the sound is “split”), what is audible is the rapid oscillation between said notes, which creates the effect of a dyad. This explains why the timbre of different multiphonics can vary dramatically, as well as the ease with which they can be modified. Moreover, the second note is not the lower partial of a particular harmonic series, but rather the highest possible frequency of the lower resonance node of a set of spectral content, which may differ significantly from any theoretical pitch because of bending or factitious pitches. This difference has a significant effect on the resultant audible pitch content and limits the practical applicability of the data provided by Hynds.[35] Despite being first demanded by composers almost 40 years ago, this technique is yet to reach widespread pedagogical implementation, for which a plausible explanation is a hitherto incomplete functional awareness of the acoustic phenomena involved. By being able to visualize an oscillation between two pitches and understand why those pitches sound the way they do, someone approaching this technique for the first time may have significantly greater confidence than if they were told only to loosen the lips to find a “break point.” Several authors, meanwhile, refer to simultaneous singing and playing as “humming and playing” (Svoboda and Roth, 2017, p. 101; Cummings, 2004, p. 9; John Wallace, 2019a), which, once more, may reflect how vocalizations feel whilst playing, given that they resonate significantly in the mouth and vocal cavities.[36] However, humming requires the lips to be shut or the rear of the tongue to be raised to the soft palate, with vocalizations emerging solely through the nostrils, and therefore cannot be executed while playing a labrosone (excluding some exceptional circumstances) (Adler-McKean, 2020, pp. 78, 152). Air sound resonances, meanwhile, are described as “sibilant” sounds (Svoboda and Roth, 2017, p. 120), which “create the sound of rushing air” (Szlavnics, 2004, p. 36). Formant modulation can control these sounds with the requisite air flow, but these descriptions lack recognition of how modal resonances function in the first place. Knowledge of the processes involved, which result in these background (white noise) resonances being continually present (if not always audible) during lip buzzing, is key to understanding their timbral potential, the manner and extent to which they can be combined with buzzed sounds, and how they can be controlled in terms of absolute pitch (Adler-McKean, 2020, pp. 97–99, 101–102).
As instruments that use human musculature to create resonance, brass instruments demand sound production that functions in a fundamentally different manner to strings, reeds, bars, membranes, or the like. Many of the misunderstandings listed above stem from a lack of awareness that labrosone resonances are created not by blowing air through the instrument, but rather by blowing air to vibrate the lips, which in turn resonate the air that is already inside the instrument, a system known as a cooperative regime of oscillation (Campbell, Greated, and Myers, 2004, p. 151). Being conscious of this process can have significant pedagogical effects. Arnold Jacobs’s musicality-based approach described earlier frequently gives way today to a physiological basis for labrosone teaching, one which is often lacking in critical self-reflection; according to Simon Wills (1997), “many conservatoire teachers use the language of the sports field: the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, though it is doubtful whether, in these circumstances, bread is to the wise” (pp. 175–76). Tuba pedagogy places importance on creating a “good tone” (Myers, 2019), which is generally taken to mean that resonances are unaffected by the oral cavity (that is, they require a rounded, open formant shape as far back in the throat as possible), yet such subjective descriptions hinder utilization of the vast range of other timbral possibilities presented by the tuba family. Acousticians, meanwhile, often lack awareness of the musical contexts of their research. Campbell, Gilbert, and Myers (2021) describe “the musician’s interpretation of the brass playing experience” as “different but complementary” to “the scientific perspective,” but only in a “short chapter” which lacks reference to many techniques, technologies, and repertoires relevant to contemporary instrumental practice, for example, regarding performance of microtonal or other non-equally-tempered music (pp. 13–30). An interdisciplinary approach can combine organological awareness of historical contexts with acoustical awareness of how sound production and manipulation functions, as well as practice-based awareness of the physiological and psychological conditions required for contemporary performance practice applications. My initial work here resulted in a publication (Adler-McKean, 2020, see also Adler-McKean, 2023, pp. 64–78) that aimed at presenting the fundamentals of sound production and generation with the tuba family in a manner that enables the instruments’ full sonic resources to be taken advantage of practically by both performers and composers. The following case study, meanwhile, exemplifies how such an approach can be realized while exploring ontological questions surrounding the combination of electronic sound generation with acoustic musical instruments.
Case Study 2: The Feedback Tuba
By considering the resonant structure of a labrosone (instrument, mouthpiece, embouchure, and respiratory system) as an air-containing body which can be controlled and manipulated in various ways, it is possible to allow for timbral nuance and experimentation that can shape how a performer can most fully utilize the instrument in front of them. As an example of the creative potential enabled by this approach, what follows is an introduction to an electro-acoustic extension to the tuba that I am currently co-developing, the feedback tuba. This case study will discuss the practicalities involved in creating a secondary resonant system within a labrosone and present an initial analysis of the sonic material created as a result, as well as the preliminary data- and audio-based documentation.[37]
So-called “hybrid” or “augmented” labrosones have existed since the late 1980s, and all involve some form of sensor(s) (air pressure, magnetic, infrared, optical, etc.) and/or manually controllable trigger(s) (potentiometers, switches, additional valves, etc.) in combination with microphones to control sound modulation and dispersion through a computer-based amplification system (ibid., pp. 413–17). Such systems allow the performer to control manipulation of their own sound, but fundamentally rely upon external resonators for modulation and dispersion.[38] Therefore, while providing the performer with greater autonomy, they invoke the same schism between the primary instrumental- and secondary computer-based sound worlds that is found in music for labrosones and electronics written from the 1950s to the present day. I aim to move away from this model by exploring various means of reciprocal human and electronic sound generation and manipulation. This concept involves maintaining full performative autonomy whilst integrating another resonant system within the acoustic instrument itself, enabling acoustic and electronic resonant systems to coexist mutually symbiotically within the same resonant chamber. The resultant hybrid instrument is still in a nascent phase of production and musical employment, with ongoing explorations made possible through an understanding of the underlying acoustic phenomena and organological properties.[39]
A feedback system requires the creation of a continuous resonance pathway, that is, an unbroken chamber into which a microphone and speaker can be placed at opposing ends. An acoustic challenge is presented when combining such resonances with a (valved) labrosone, given a lack of entry points into which both a microphone and speaker can be placed. Feedback systems therefore lend themselves to reed aerophones, as these are generally open-hole instruments, with tone or key holes into which a speaker and/or microphone can be placed, with experimentations to date including a setup developed in 2012 for the contrabass clarinet.[40] The tuba bell can be used to house a speaker, although this apparatus must balance being of a large enough size to activate a tube resonance length of nearly four meters, while also not impeding the acoustic resonance of the instrument itself. To this end, a 3D-printed mount is used to support a 24-Watt, multi-directional speaker in a position which does not interfere with the acoustic resonant structure of the bell. However, through experimentation we concluded that threading a microphone through the instrument from either the bell or mouthpiece end of the tube caused unmitigable disturbance to the harmonic structure of the instrument, and so an extra ingress point was needed for insertion of a microphone. Therefore, a hole was made in the fourth valve tuning slide, onto which a screw fitting was soldered that can accept a piezoelectric microphone.[41] The speaker and microphone are connected through a programmable interface system based on the microprocessor ESP32 with LV2 plug-ins, controllable by a foot pedal, which maximizes the internal feedback loop signal, necessary due to the relatively weak low-frequency response of piezoelectric microphones. Future developments will require production of bespoke components, initially by means of wireless, miniaturized audio technology (utilizing new, stronger piezoelectric devices) that can be mounted at various points along the complete tube length, and ultimately through embedded technology in meta-materials that can be used for construction of the instrument (or parts thereof) itself.
Feedback resonance has an innate hysteresis, in that its nature is partially or fully dependent on whatever immediately preceded it and is “sensitively dependent on parameters of the room and the equipment” (McLaughlin, 2022). This characteristic puts it at odds with common performance, compositional and analytical practices, and thus presents an ongoing challenge when attempting to produce sonic material that is simultaneously definable, reliable, and repeatable. With the fourth valve depressed as a trigger for the feedback system, the 32 possible combinations of the other five valves progressively elongate the overall length of the resonant system, making the pitch generally descend as would be expected, but not always. The pitch occasionally jumps up or down, marking where a harmonic can no longer be resonated by the fixed power input from the speaker, and so moves to different modal points. The hysterical nature of this system means that the valve length which causes such a jump is, to an extent, unpredictable, and dependent upon the preceding valve combination. A separate set of resonant frequencies are also audible when the mouthpiece end is closed. Lip-reed vibrations have a resonant length slightly beyond the end of the tube; if the bell is fully closed (or pitched “air noises” are produced), then the pitch goes up by around three quarters of a tone (Adler-McKean, 2020, pp. 36, 101).[42] With the feedback system, resonances are generated near the bell end of the cone, meaning that the mouthpiece now also functions as a bell. Closing this exit thus changes the resonant length, and therefore also the sounding pitch of the feedback.
Resonances generated by the lips can be articulated through musculature—the lips themselves, the tongue, throat, and/or abdominal muscles—which, at all above the lowest energy levels, can trigger sounds almost instantaneously. The feedback oscillation regime, meanwhile, lacks such fine levels of control and resonance activation. When depressing valves, lip-reed sounds change pitch simultaneously when the resonant length is changed, but such a process can take several seconds with feedback resonance. Feedback articulation can be triggered by building up pressure inside the oral cavity and then releasing the tongue from the roof of the mouth, the resulting pressure pulse occasionally leading to a higher modal resonance being activated than would otherwise be made audible. Depending on the valve length and strength of the pressure pulse employed, the resonance can stabilize at this pitch, or drop back down to the lower resonance soon after the pressure pulse has died away. Valves are discrete mechanisms of pitch alteration; by selecting the fourth valve tuning slide as the mounting position for the microphone, the fourth valve touchpiece forms an on/off switch for the feedback system. However, valves can also be used as a continuous form of sonic modification, through a technique known as fractional valving.[43] When the fourth valve is depressed halfway, new sets of feedback pitches are produced, as resonances are now partially bypassing the valve loop, which, owing to the hysteresis of the feedback resonance, can vary depending on whether the valve has reached the halfway point from fully closed or fully open. To modulate the timbre of these sounds, it is necessary to utilize the smaller apertures created by fractional valve positions. Between off and half depressed, it is possible to control a crescendo into the feedback sound and create higher harmonics as the feedback passes through the varying-sized aperture as the valve is opened. Such a timbral effect is also audible as a valve is partially released, albeit at a higher dynamic, as the feedback resonance has already been established. When the valve is then released slightly more, it is possible to oscillate between the closed and half-valved feedback positions, creating beating patterns between these two pitches. Further developments in this area demand a finer level of fractional valve control; I aim here to substitute the linkage and spring mechanism of valve depression and release with an electro-mechanical system that allows for both smoother and faster valve manipulation than is possible with fingers alone.
The lips are both a means of sound production, and of sound modulation. This distinction manifests itself as a primary acoustic division of labrosone sound production, namely between high-flow rate, low-pressure systems, and low-flow rate, high-pressure systems (Watson, 2019). When playing in the lower register and/or at lower dynamics, the tuba functions as a high-flow rate, low-pressure system, as can be observed by removing the mouthpiece from the lips while playing to find that they are not vibrating by themselves, but only do so when part of a cooperative regime of oscillation. However, at higher dynamics and volumes, particularly when approaching the bell cut-off frequency or during production of non-linear spectral content (Campbell, 2019, pp. 10–11), low-flow rate, high-pressure sound production takes over, as lip resonance becomes increasingly influential.[44] This differentiation is particularly important when a secondary resonant system is involved, such feedback resonance, but also the human voice (Adler-McKean, 2020, pp. 151–56). When an extreme high-flow rate, low-pressure system is used in the very low register, lip-reed sound can coexist with such secondary resonators, although it can take a few seconds to stabilize a simultaneous resonance. As more energy is added to the system by playing at higher volumes and in higher registers, a phenomenon known as mode locking occurs, which is when the two adjacent resonances resonate together at mutually harmonic points (Wolfe, n.d.). This effect is more pronounced at middle and higher registers, where the lip-reed sound combines with the feedback sound at higher modal points, in a similar manner to factitious sound production and the creation of “pedal notes” on narrower-bore labrosones (Adler-McKean, 2020, pp. 104–07). When the lips are behaving fully in the low-flow rate, high-pressure system, primarily in the instrument’s highest register, they can operate with relative independence to the feedback, much as in the very lowest register. These three modes of combining feedback and lip-reed resonances produce clearly differentiable timbral characteristics, which are defined by their individual acoustic properties.
Conclusions
As the feedback tuba is refined further, more sonic possibilities will be discovered and developed. This will also inevitably lead to creative challenges, as is the nature of experimentation. By framing this process within historically- and acoustically informed perspectives and documenting the results through data collection and audio recordings, these challenges can themselves become sources of knowledge generation. Attempting to define, refine, or analyze experimentalism is often dismissed as antithetical to such creative practices, Campbell, Greated, and Myers (2004) arguing that “a large part of the creative element of avant-garde music is in devising new effects,” refusing to go into any further detail as “a listing … would be soon dated” (p. 205). However, as demonstrated with the feedback tuba, such “new effects,” particularly when discussing timbral experimentation, are often grounded in the basic acoustic phenomena associated with labrosone sound production. A parallel can be seen in an assessment of the serpent from 1927, the author admitting that “few of us have occasion either to listen to, or perform on, the serpent,” yet still asserting that “it is attractive neither to the eye nor to the ear” (Westrup, 1927, p. 635). Almost a century later, performers can no longer rely on a lack of historical or acoustic resources as a reason for failing to critically self-reflect upon their own practices. Both statements stem from deficiencies of interdisciplinary awareness, where knowledge is not shared between performance-, composition-, and research-based parties. As a result, these acoustic and instrumental resources cannot be exploited to their full timbral potential. It can be hoped that, by critically examining historical-, quantitative-, and performance-based-methodologies to develop means of cooperation between such specialisms, labrosones and their associated techniques, technologies, repertoire, and performance practices can develop fruitfully into the future.
Appendix
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Notes
[*] All translations are done by the author unless otherwise stated.
[1] A “labrosone” (Baines, 1976, p. 40) generates sound through vibration of the lips without any external membrane. The term “has not yet caught on widely in vernacular usage” (Yeo, 2021, p. 81), but will be used here to reflect the fact these instruments, traditionally referred to as “brass” or “brasswind” instruments, are often neither made of metal, nor does their sound directly result from any flow of wind through the instrument.
[2] Hermann von Helmholz (1877) was one of the earliest and most influential theorists who would apply terms such as “bass” and “contrabass” to absolute pitch rather than relative timbre.
[3] Christian Ahrens notes that the parts contain rapid notes and frequent large leaps, but also agrees that, given the lack a violone or double bass part, the instrument is fundamentally used to support the bass (Ahrens, 2001, pp. 68–69). He also hypothesises that the diminutive serpentini could be used to refer to a bass cornett rather than a serpent (Ahrens, 2015, p. 285).
[4] Joseph Brousse (1925) dates usage in the Gardes françaises as early 1764, but without providing a source.
[5] A march including two serpents by Carlo Canobbio is found in the pasticcio The Early Reign of Oleg, premiered in St. Petersburg in 1791.
[6] By the time Ein Faust-Overtüre (1839), Rienzi (1842), and Wagner’s other early works including a serpent were premiered in Dresden, a bass tuba was almost certainly used for these parts (Heyde, 2017, pp. 34–35).
[7] Given their common use in military bands, these instruments are also sometimes known as “military serpents,” a term also used for some English instruments in “S”-shape with additional metal bracing (Bevan, 2000, p. 79).
[8] Michael Nagy (1985) suggests that Mendelssohn’s terminology Serpente indicates some form of bass horn, although this claim is lacking in clear primary source evidence.
[9] The serpent was used earlier in Johann Simon Mayr’s Zamori, ossia L'eroe dell'Indie (1804), although this was as part of a separate military band.
[10] Niccolò Paganini, who created perhaps the first orchestral part for cimbasso in his Violin Concerto No. 1 (1816), also wrote for serpentone, e gimbasso in his Violin Concerto No. 3 (1826) (Bevan, 2000, p. 407).
[11] Melchiorre Balbi’s treatise of 1845 suggests that a tromboncino is “a trumpet slightly larger than the normal one” (Balbi, 1845 p.143). In the first published edition of the parts (ca. 1862–63) it is named as a bombardone, and in an early published score (1898) as a cimbasso.
[12] While ophicleides are commonly treated as being organologically distinct from bass horns, their all-metal construction and lack of uncovered tone holes are reflected in several models of serpent and bass horn. Others argue that the ophicleide was indeed developed from an earlier form of keyed metal bass horn by Prospero Guivier in 1805/06 (Reuter, 2002, p. 447), perhaps created upon a commission to copy an English keyed bugle horn following the Battle of Waterloo (Kirnbauer, 2015, p. 216). The instrument is sometimes referred to as a “keyed ophicleide” to avoid confusion with valved instruments (“valved ophicleides”) of a similar design and bore profile.
[13] The hibernicon, another form of bass horn, was played by William Ponder in Thomas Harper’s “professional brass band” in 1832, although when the instrument was used orchestrally in the 1835 York Festival, Ponder, who had also played serpent at Covent Garden in 1830, had notably swapped to ophicleide (McGrattan, 2020, p. 125).
[14] Despite Haydn specifying contrabassoon in the score for The Creation, the fact that the instrument was “virtually unknown” in Vienna when the oratorio was premiered there in 1799 (Smither, 2012, p. 498) has led to suggestions that a serpent was used instead (or as well) in early performances (Schreiber, 1938, p. 136). The part noted at the work’s German premiere in 1802 is for “contra-bassoon or serpent” (Günther, 1996, pp. 57–58).
[15] This is often still the case when concerning orchestras and ensembles otherwise devoted to historically informed performance. A 2016 performance of Verdi’s Requiem (1874) from The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment used a modern “Verdi” cimbasso (hollowchatter, 2016), and Concerto Köln’s performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold (1853) in 2021 used a bombardon-style instrument of common mid-twentieth-century design (illustrated in Apthorp, 2021).
[16] While the order of dominating factors changed between the other instruments included in his survey, in all cases, the specific instrument itself had the least noticeable effect on the subjective assessment of the performance.
[17] As far as can be ascertained, Campbell’s data was produced using a modern copy of an early nineteenth-century serpent, and a modern contrabassoon. Further research is required to investigate whether such results can be reproduced using historically and geographically contemporaneous instruments.
[18] This is not a new phenomenon: in an early advertisement for the (valved) bombardon, Othmar Berndl (1833) argued that it had “greater worth” than the (keyed) ophicleide “because an instrument with multiple keys is always a deterrent to the learner.”
[19] For further historical contexts regarding the nineteenth-century revolution in labrosone technologies, techniques, and timbres, see Strauchen-Scherer, 2018.
[20] This is despite a significant article in the same publication regarding the serpent itself (Hostiou, 2021). Another article in this edition on the topic of performance practice, this time regarding Mahler’s Second Symphony, makes no attempt to provide any historical context (McCourt, 2021).
[21] For clarification regarding how the name cimbasso has been used since the mid-nineteenth century, see Adler-McKean, 2023, pp. 29–31, 61–63.
[22] For a playlist of further recordings of orchestral repertoire on these and other historical tuba family instruments, see https://tinyurl.com/283nzdpm. For a playlist of further comparative examples between historical and modern instruments, see https://tinyurl.com/3yn55x7t.
[23] At the time of writing, productions of both Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens (1846) and Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold (1869) on period instruments have recently taken place across Europe.
[24] For details of this process, see Adler-McKean, 2022, pp. 132–35.
[25] A list of sources cited in this chart can be found in the Appendix. A more detailed version of this chart including the full range(s), name(s) and pitch(es) of each instrument (optional, exceptional, or unusual range extensions are in cue notes, fundamental pitches (if provided) are in coloured letters), as well as the author’s name and country of publication can be found at http://tinyurl.com/h9kd24jk
[26] Kunitz’s text is dominated by discussion regarding tuba and bass trombone orchestration by Strauss and Wagner, commentary which itself has been subject to criticism (see Ahrens, 2013). For contemporary discussion regarding Červený and the development of the contrabass tuba, see Adler-McKean, 2022, pp. 122–30.
[27] For a detailed listing of such instrument-specific writing, see Adler-McKean, 2023, pp. 3–37.
[28] Many nineteenth-century composers were also limited in their awareness and understanding of the tuba family, though commonly cited examples are often lacking in rigour. Most infamously, Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 From the New World (1893) has a tuba part with only fourteen notes (see anecdotal commentary in Del Mar, 1981, p. 308; and Bevan, 2000, p. 335), but examination of the manuscript shows a considerably more extensive part that was either removed or missed by a copyist when making the first edition.
[29] The original pitches have been included in the critical edition of the score but are rarely performed to this day.
[30] Physiological awareness in labrosone performance practice has undergone significant research in recent decades, notably by Dr. Peter Iltis (n.d.).
[31] In the opposite extreme, Hill (1996) does not include any score excerpts, resulting in subjective descriptions such as sound as being “like a subtle laugh,” “a musical wink,” or “good for a rough and wild character” (pp. 47, 48, 56).
[32] Some questionable organological assumptions are still made, notably when discussing contrabass instruments (pp. 36–38), and the bombardon (pp. 24–25).
[33] These acoustic phenomena have detailed entries in some recent scientific and reference publications (Campbell, Gilbert, and Myers, 2021; Herbert, Myers, and Wallace, 2019), but are still awaiting reproduction in texts aimed at aiding performance- and composition-based studies.
[34] Even if this were acoustically logical, Schweinitz notes that this requires a “main slide prolonged by circa 12 cm,” which is physically impossible on almost all models of tuba without the slide falling out.
[35] The information he provides is useful in describing theoretical rather than audible resultant spectral content from tuba multiphonics. However, given that this distinction is not made, and that the containing section is entitled The Composer's Guide to the Tuba, it can be assumed that it is intended to fulfil the latter.
[36] Near-universal description of this technique as “multiphonics” has also hindered the widespread understanding and pedagogical application of actual multiphonics as noted above, with contemporary texts still often altogether failing to address the existence of the latter (for example, Yeo, 2021, p. 93).
[37] For the full-size chart displayed in this video, see http://tinyurl.com/3fvdcwr5
[38] Some experimentation with integrated electronic resonant modulation has taken place but regarding labrosones thus far only for the purpose of analysis or “improving the sound quality and playability” of existing instruments (ibid., p. 412).
[39] The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of the composer Luciano Azzigotti for his creative role in the development and implementation of the feedback tuba system.
[40] This system was employed most notably in Eduardo Moguillansky’s Luftzug Etude #3: Grenzgang (2012). As with labrosones, experimentation with integrated electro-acoustic systems for other aerophones have also been used primarily for analytical and not creative purposes (ibid., pp. 411–12).
[41] The microphone and associated fitting were developed by the Australian company PiezoBarrel (https://piezobarrel.com/, retrieved 20 October, 2023).
[42] Another labrosone technique often misunderstood acoustically by composers and performers, Karlheinz Stockhausen notably wrote in his preface to LUCIFERs TANZ (1991), that “on the trumpet, strangely enough, coloured noises [pitched air noises] sound ½ tone higher than normal notes […] on the piccolo trumpet these coloured noises, however, sound a whole tone higher.”
[43] At time of writing, detailed research into fractional valving is being undertaken by Robin Hayward and is due for publication in 2024.
[44] While undesirable in traditional labrosone performance practice, high-pressure sound production or “over-buzzing” can be used to a limited extent in lower tessituras.