Don’t Forget Your Mouthpiece

I recently posted this on the SibeliusMusic chat page in response to a request for information about the Wagner Tuba, an instrument which is unsurprisingly overlooked by most orchestration textbooks. I thought I’d put it up here for the benefit of other SibMus users (and anyone else!) in the future. At some point I’ll do a few more articles on other aspects of writing for the horn, like hand-stopping and so forth. In my experience, published information on this subject tends to be very sketchy and gives composers an incomplete understanding of what’s really possible and what’s not. Feel free to comment if you feel I’ve missed anything out or got anything wrong.

Ok. Wagner Tubas.

They come in two sizes - tenor and bass, although nowadays many instruments are built like double horns so that one instrument will do for both. In my opinion these generally don’t sound as good. When used, there will generally be a pair of each, and they are played by horn players using ordinary horn mouthpieces. Normally there will be a section of 8 horns, with nos. 5-8 doubling on the tubas.

Transpositions vary, although most of the time the tenors are in Bb (written a 9th above concert pitch) and the basses are in F (written an OCTAVE and a 5th above concert pitch - NB this is NOT the same as a french horn in F). Having said that, nobody would complain if you just wrote the parts in F (up a 5th) as it’s one less thing for us poor horn players to worry about. Beware when looking at scores of Wagner because he did lots of weird things like change transpositions mid-score, and then have the parts in a different key altogether.

Range is pretty much the same as for the horn, facility - well, they don’t lend themselves particularly well to virtuoso flying about, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped Wagner and Strauss from writing like that anyway.

They are notoriously difficult to get in tune, and quite often I’ve found for instance that the only way to get a reliable low C sharp is to finger a C and lip it down, whilst simultaneously gargling a vanilla latte, whistling “Jerusalem” etc. The characteristics are different for each instrument as well. They make up for all this by making a truly fabulous sound, like burnished gold or glowing fire… (excuse me, getting a bit carried away. Nurse…) The sound in fact was something that Wagner was specifically looking for to play the “Valhalla” theme in the Ring Cycle, and is somewhere in between that of a horn and a trombone.

They are quite rare among amateurs. Almost all professional orchestras own at least one set, as they are deployed reasonably often in the symphonic/opera repertoire (see list below). For this reason individual players tend not to own them, however there are a few who own sets and will hire them out if you ask them nicely.

Here is a list of the most well-known works that use them:

Wagner - Ring Cycle (obviously!) In particular listen to Siegfried’s Funeral Music from Gotterdammerung.

R Strauss - Alpine Symphony, Elektra

Bruckner - Symphonies 7 (2nd and 4th mvts),8 and 9.

Schoenberg - Gurrelieder

Stravinsky - Rite of Spring (only briefly, towards the end of Part 1, and there are only two.)

They are also used extensively in film music, to beef up the big horn lines. They are good for this sort of unison playing, but their true greatness is in the quartet stuff like the second movement of Bruckner 7, or the Siegfried Funeral Music that I mentioned above.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Horn Playing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.