Re: Can Someone Please Help...


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Posted by Rick Denney on February 16, 2000 at 11:44:43:

In Reply to: Can Someone Please Help... posted by Tom on February 15, 2000 at 20:11:03:

The scientist in me begs for a different take.

Technically, the tuba and the flute require the most wind of any conventional musical instrument. That wind ranges from 3 or 4 liters/minute for high, soft tones to around 140 liters/minute for low, loud tones (ref: Fredericksen: _Arnold Jacobs, Song and Wind_, Windsong Press).

The tuba is the natural bass of conical brass instruments that use valves and a cup-shaped mouthpiece. Conical instruments include the euphonium (or tenor tuba), baritone, alto horn, and to some extent a cornet and fluegelhorn. By contrast (with the French horn in its own class), the other brass instruments in a typical symphony orchestra are cylindrical, including trumpets and trombones. Therefore, the tuba has a more sonorous sound with less bite or edge to the tone. For this reason, it has lyrical qualities unique to cylindrical brass instruments in the hands of a capable player.

Tubas were invented after the invention of the valve. Most brass instruments without valves play notes high in their harmonic series, where notes are close together, to give them enough versatility of notes. Tubas play low in their harmonic series, where notes are far apart, and therefore must have a way of changing the harmonic series to allow a composer enough notes to be useful. The valves change add tubing to the instrument, and therefore change the fundametal pitch and the harmonic series.

Music for tubas is written in concert pitch, meaning that the notes written is the note sounded. But tubas are commonly available in four different fundamental pitches (BBb, CC, Eb, and F), and the player must therefore use different fingering to play the same music on a different instrument. This is also in contrast to music written for brass instruments before the invention of the valve.

The tuba was first patented by Moritz and Weiprecht in 1846 (ref: Bevan: _The Tuba Family_), and that instrument was an F tuba with five valves.

The range of a tuba is not fixed, but orchestral music requires a range from the pedal register (the lowest note I know of, in a Prokofiev symphony, is the C# seven ledger lines below the bass clef) up about four octaves (Berlioz wrote what is usually played as a Bb on the treble clef, but a player will use an F tuba here rather than the CC or BBb used for the Prokofiev).

In terms of nomenclature, the CC and BBb instruments are usually called contrabass tubas, and the Eb and F tubas are called bass tubas.

That summary plus the two references (should be available in the music library of any college) should get you started.


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