Posted by Musicologist on May 16, 2003 at 12:47:47:
In Reply to: History of the Tuba posted by mike on May 16, 2003 at 12:26:36:
First there were guys who sang very low. Then the tenors became jealous and invented the serpent. Then the alto sax players became jealous and invented the opheclide. Then the opheclide players became nauseous and some Prussian guy invented the tuba so the nauseous opheclide players could have something to "urp" into. Fortunately, there were relatively few opheclide players to begin with, so most tubas were actually used as instruments.
The first tuba was pitched in F and came into being about 1835, in Prussia. The Brits then became jealous and invented a bass tuba in Eb that could play lower (tuba envy). Then Adolph Sax thought it would be really cool to make every wind instrument be either an Eb or a BBb instrument and eventually this "trickled down" to the BBb contrabass tuba. (There were actually EEEb and maybe BBBb sub contrabass horns built, but were rather large to schlep around. Anyone jealous enough of low pitched horns who tried to play them passed out due to hyperventillation, so these horns were fairly rare.) Eventually, someone else recognized that if you could have tubas in Eb and BBb (Sax strategy), you could also have them in F and CC, and the CC tuba came about. And somewhere along the line, the French (who very few people are jealous of at the present time), decided to make a tiny tenor tuba in the key of C, with 6 valves to help low range intonation. They were jealous of real tubas, so they called their "tenor tuba" the "French tuba in C", even though that's a bit of a stretch. Today, this is known as the "Freedom tuba from C to shining C", but is still not very popular even after being renamed.
I hope that's somewhat helpful.
Steve Inman
Kokomo, IN