The Bass Trombone

The bass trombone is not, as the name might suggest, a simple enlargement of its tenor sibling. It is the same length of tubing in B♭ — but built around a wider bore and a larger bell, fitted with one or two thumb valves, and asked to live a different life: lower, slower, and structurally indispensable. Where the tenor sings, the bass trombone founds.

The instrument speaks across nearly four octaves, from a sepulchral pedal range below the staff to a sustained tenor reach high above it. Its central character, however, lies in the bottom octave — the region the valves were invented to make accessible. There the bass trombone produces some of the most powerful and most patient sound the orchestra commands.

Like the tenor, the bass trombone is a single B♭ tube — slide on the outer arms, bell at the player’s shoulder — pitched by lengthening the air column through one of seven slide positions. What distinguishes it is the bore: typically 0.562″, against the tenor’s 0.547″; and the bell, broader and deeper. The result is a darker, more cavernous fundamental — and a top register noticeably less brilliant than the tenor’s.

Most modern bass trombones carry two thumb valves. The first lowers the instrument to F; the second, engaged with the first, drops it further — most often to G♭ or D. Together they fill the gap between the lowest position of the slide and the pedal B♭, giving the player a complete chromatic compass below the staff. Earlier instruments — the great German F-Bassposaune of the nineteenth century — had only the slide, and their players were, by necessity, athletes.

The bass trombone’s tone is grave, round, and slow to anger. At soft dynamics it is among the most refined of the low brass — capable of a quiet weight that the tuba, for all its size, cannot quite imitate. At loud dynamics it can cut without becoming brittle, and lend the trombone section a depth that no other instrument supplies.

Above all it is a chordal instrument. The composer who writes a slow chorale for trombones — Mozart in the Requiem, Brahms in the Fourth, Wagner in the Ring, Bruckner everywhere — is writing, whether he says so or not, for the bass trombone’s patience. The whole choir rests on its lowest voice.

“The trombone is, in my opinion, the true head of that family of wind instruments which I have called the epic one.”

— Hector Berlioz, Treatise on Instrumentation

Berlioz spoke of the trombone family entire; the bass trombone is the member he was most often hearing in his head. Treat it accordingly — as the floor on which the brass choir, and often the orchestra, actually stands.

The bass trombone rewards the composer who writes for its weight, and punishes the one who writes for its top. A few habits, kept in mind, will spare a great deal of rewriting.

• i.Live in the bottom octave. It is what the instrument was designed for. The lowest register, particularly between F₂ and B♭₁, is where the bass trombone has no rival in the orchestra.
• ii.Treat it as the foot of the chorale. Three trombones in close harmony — two tenors above, the bass beneath — is the inheritance of two centuries. Voice the chord with the bass on the root, and the section will sound at home.
• iii.Allow time for the slide. Slide changes from first to seventh position cover roughly a metre of arm travel; rapid passagework that seems trivial on paper can be impossible in practice. The valves help — but not always.
• iv.Mind the breath. The wider bore demands more air than the tenor. Long sustained tones in the pedal range are perhaps the most expensive notes in the orchestra; build space to draw breath into every line.
• v.Keep clear of the upper extreme. The bass trombone can reach C₅ and beyond, but the tone narrows quickly above F₄. Above this, the tenor will almost always serve the music better.

Beyond these rules, write the line in conversation with the player. A bass trombonist will tell you what is possible — and, with rare generosity, exactly which valve combination will make it so.

A short, partial list — five passages in which the bass trombone is not merely present but indispensable, and in which the orchestra would be a different orchestra without it.

1. № 01

   Wagner — Götterdämmerung

   Siegfried’s Funeral March

   Low brass at full stretch — the bass trombone among them, anchoring the chord that mourns a hero.

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2. № 02

   Berlioz — Grande messe des morts

   Tuba mirum

   Four brass choirs answer one another from the corners of the cathedral; the bass trombones are the floor on which it all stands.

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3. № 03

   Holst — The Planets

   Mars, the Bringer of War

   A martial ostinato dragged into the lowest register — the bass trombone giving the music its threat.

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4. № 04

   Mahler — Symphony No. 6

   Finale

   Among the great low-brass chorales of the literature; the bass trombone speaks where the tenor cannot reach.

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5. № 05

   Stravinsky — Le Sacre du printemps

   Sacrificial Dance

   Stabbed pedal tones, brutal and exact — the instrument in its rawest civic role.

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Further entries will be added as our study deepens.

The trombone is the oldest of the orchestra’s brass — older even than the modern violin. Its Renaissance ancestor, the sackbut, was already a fully chromatic instrument in the fifteenth century, used in the basilicas of Venice and the courts of Burgundy. From the sixteenth century the family was built in matched sizes — soprano, alto, tenor, bass — and the lowest member, in F or E♭, was the bass trombone’s first form.

Through the eighteenth century the bass trombone remained chiefly an instrument of the church. Mozart wrote for it in the Requiem; Beethoven gave it its first symphonic role in the Fifth, and again — unforgettably — in the Ninth. The instruments of this era were narrower of bore than today’s, often pitched in F, and frequently played by specialists drawn from a small confraternity of cathedral musicians.

Through the nineteenth century the German F-Bassposaune reigned in the orchestral pit — a long instrument, slow of slide, whose lowest positions required a handle attached to the brace for the player’s outstretched arm. Wagner wrote for it in the Ring; Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler followed. Its tone was darker and weightier than the modern instrument; its execution was slower and far more athletic.

Around 1839, the Leipzig maker Christian Friedrich Sattler fitted a B♭ tenor trombone with a thumb-operated rotary valve in F — producing, in effect, a tenor-bass capable of reaching the lower register without the long F slide. The design spread; through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it gradually displaced the older F instrument, particularly in the larger American orchestras.

The mid-twentieth century saw the addition of a second thumb valve — in G♭, D, or E♭ — engaged together with the F valve to fill the gap between the lowest slide position and the pedal B♭. The double-valved bass trombone, with its wide bore, large bell, and complete chromatic compass below the staff, is the instrument heard today in nearly every professional orchestra. It is, in essence, the instrument Stravinsky already imagined when he wrote the lowest sustained pages of Le Sacre.

Specifications

A summary, for the composer’s desk.