Posted by Rick Denney on May 09, 2002 at 13:07:35:
In Reply to: Re: Re: CC or BBb posted by question on May 09, 2002 at 11:21:13:
This is an incendiary topic about which many a flame war has singed a variety of combatants. I'll try to summarize in a neutral way, and hope not to get fried.
Some history:
The first tubas were pitched in F. Then Sax built his family of tubas around Bb and Eb intervals from soprano saxhorns down to bass saxhorns in Eb. I Don't think there was any argument made at the time for one over the other, because the differences in instrument design made a bigger difference than pitch and a better topic for debate. Cerveny invented the rotary valve in the 1850's, making possible a range of large-bored contrabass tubas, the first of which seem to have been in BBb. So, the CC tuba has no claim on the earliest history, but then neither does the BBb.
Both BBb and CC tubas have been in use for a long time among orchestra players who use contrabass tubas.
My own opinion is that the saxhorn family of instruments was more popular with military bands in the 19th century, and school bands tried to emulate these military bands, so they used basically the same instruments. That led to the common use of BBb and Eb instruments in the low brass. Orchestra players went their own way, using mostly F tubas in Britain and Germany, and C tenor tubas in France. They probably used whatever they could get in the way of contrabass tubas early on for those pieces of music that required them.
Some early orchestral players in the U.S. adopted C tubas, probably in hopes that their intonation characteristics would be easier to manage in orchestras. But BBb was still the standard in professional bands, which were at least as commercially successful as any orchestras in the early part of the 20th century. That popularity faded, and popular music moved away from including the tuba as part of the instrumentation. Schools continued to use BBb tubas, probably mostly because of inertia, and some influential orchestra pros used CC tubas.
Today, and for the last few decades, many players hold orchestral players in the highest regard, and emulate their choices in hopes of being more like them. This has fed a general trend towards CC as a "serious" instrument. This shift in demand has not been lost on the manufacturers, who put their best efforts for their pro-grade tubas into the CC instruments. Thus, the most expensive tubas on the market were pitched in CC, and were bought up by more orchestra pros whose influence was even greater than it had been early on. That trend has continued such that most serious high-schoolers either play on a CC tuba or wish they did.
But most of us who played in school years ago followed the tradition of using BBb in school, and many of us who never studied the tuba in college never made the switch.
In terms of function, a good BBb tuba can do anything a good CC tuba can do, and vice versa. The CC tuba is perhaps a bit more agile to the BBb player picking it up for the first time, because the tubing is two feet shorter and it takes less time to resonate notes. This perception, it seems to me, fades for the player and is unnoticed altogether by the audience.
There are more wonderful CC tubas on the new market than wonderful BBb tubas, especially if you measure value in dollars. But that doesn't mean both pitches aren't well represented with excellent instruments both new and old.
A quick concluding story: When I first showed up to my current community band, I brought my York Master (BBb). The conductor is a top-flight professional tuba player, but the York Master is uncommon and he'd never seen one. His first question to me came after several rehearsals where he'd heard me play quite a bit: "Is that a C tuba?" He can hear me play well enough to pick out errors that I make in the midst of the full band tutti, even errors of sound consistency that I can hardly hear when I'm playing by myself. With ears like that, and with his experience, he still could not determine for sure by hearing or seeing whether my tuba was a Bb or a C.
That tells me all I need to know about the real differences out front.
Rick "who is happy with his BBb tubas but who has loved some CC tubas, too" Denney