Re: Re: Re: tuba keys??


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Posted by Rick Denney on December 20, 2002 at 10:38:39:

In Reply to: Re: Re: tuba keys?? posted by Dan Schultz on December 20, 2002 at 09:26:54:

You may know what a tuba is, but I see euphoniums and baritone horns offered on ebay every day represented as tubas.

To present Steve's explanation in a different way, musicologists need a way to describe which octave they are talking about in any given discussion. One of the older methods for doing this use lower case, upper case, and doubled letters to denote the octave. Thus, a CC was an octave below a C, which was an otave under a c, above which you'd find a cc, and so on.

The first instrument to which this nomenclature applied was the Bb contrabass tuba. Given that the first tubas were pitched in F and Bb, and that tenor tubas and euphonium-like instruments were given the same family name (i.e. "tuba" or "saxhorn"), a contrabass tuba needed a designation that would set it apart. Thus BBb. As the C tuba grew in popularity, the convention stuck that it would be called a CC to designate it as also being a contrabass instrument. One or the other of BBb or CC violates the old octave nomenclature, however, but they lie on either side of the octave boundary. No matter--traditions don't need reasons.

(The octave mistakes are actually fairly recent. My copy of the 1920's York catalog uses BBb Bass, C Bass, and Eb Bass to describe their instruments. "BBb" and "C" are used on a single catalog page with a picture intended to portray either one.)

The fly in the ointment is your beloved Eb tuba. Boosey and Hawkes insists on using "EEb" to describe their compensating tubas. I believe this is a marketing ploy to establish the notion that the compensated Eb tuba really serves as a contrabass instrument, like a C or Bb contrabass, because of the compensating valves.

Except for the Besson outlier, I like the convention for its organologic simplicity. We have contrabass tubas in BBb and CC, bass tubas in Eb and F, and tenor tubas in Bb and C (some with more specialized names). And it works to identify the instruments. If I see a tuba-shaped instrument with no size reference offered for sale, under the description "Old Tuba", then I can't always be sure what I'm seeing. But if they say "BBb tuba", then I know it isn't an old baritone horn. When we describe as tuba as BBb or CC, we all know with exact precisions to what sort of instrument we are referring, once someone has described the system. That's all that can be expected of a nomenclature.

Rick "who never underestimates the availability of fools" Denney


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