Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/843

OPHICLEIDE 779 It was not until 1815 that the use of the new instru ment spread upon the Continent. We find in the account -books of a Belgian maker, Tuerlinckx of Mechlin, that his first supply of a bugle-horn bears the date of 25th March 1815, and it was made "aen den Heer Muldener, lieutenant in het regiment due d York." The acoustic principle inaugurated by Halliday consisted in binding together by chromatic degrees the second and third harmonics, to FIG. 4. Keyed Q- - I Bugle. $5 ^ H. He attained it, as we have just seen, by the help of five keys. The principle once discovered, it became easy to extend it to instruments of the largest size, of which the com pass, like the "basson russe," began at the lowest sound. It was simply necessary to bind the fundamental ^ to the next harmonic sound zEi_ of keys. This was done in 1817 by Jean Hilaire Aste, known by a larger number as Halary, a professor of music and instrument -maker at Paris. We find the description of the instruments for which he sought a patent in the llap- jwrt de r Academic Royalc des Beaux -Arts de I Institut de France, meeting of 19th July 1817. These instruments were three in number : (1) the clavi-tube, a keyed trumpet; (2) the quinti-tube, or quinti-clave ; (3) the ophicleide, a keyed serpent. The clavi-tube was no other than the bugle-horn slightly modified in some details of construction, and reproduced in the different tonalities Ab, F, Eb, D, C, Bb, A, and Ab. The quinti-tube had nearly the form of a bassoon, and was, in the first instance, armed with eight keys, and constructed in two tonalities, F and Eb. This was the instrument afterwards named "alto ophicleide." The ophicleide, of which we reproduce a drawing (fig. 5), had the same form as the quinti-tube. It was at first ad justed with nine or ten keys, and the number was carried on to twelve, each key to give a semitone (additional patent of 16th August 1822). The ophicleide or bass of the harmony was made in C and in Bb, the contra-bass in F and in Eb. 1 It is certain that from the point of view of -p j~ n i i i invention Halary s labours had only secondary " ,, 77 ? U e importance; but, if the principle of keyed chro matic instruments with cupped mouthpiece 2 goes back to Halliday, it was Halary s merit to know how to take advantage of the prin ciple in extending it to instruments of diverse tonalities, in group ing them in one single family, that of the bugles, in so complete a manner that the improvements of modern manufacture have not widened its limits either in the grave or the acute direction. Keyed chromatic wind instruments made their way rapidly ; to their in troduction into military full or brass bands we can date the regenera tion of military music. After pistons had been invented some forty years, instruments with keys could still reckon their partisans. 1 The report of the Academic des Beaux-Arts on the subject of this invention shows a strange misconception of it, which it is interesting to recall. "As to the two instruments which M. Halary designs under the names of quinti-clave and ophicleide, they bear a great resemblance to those submitted to the Academy in the sitting of the llth of March 1811 by M. Dumas, which he designed under the names of basse et contrebasse guerrieres. . . . The opinion of our commission on the quinti-clave and ophicleide is that M. Halary can only claim the merit of an improvement and not that of an entire invention ; still, for an equitable judgment on this point, we shoiild compare the one with the other, and this our commission cannot do, not having the instruments of M. Dumas at our disposal." This is what the commission ought to have had, but it would have sufficed had they referred to the report of the sittings of 6th and 8th April, in which it is clearly explained that the instruments presented by M. Du.nas were bass clarinets (Moniteur Universel of 19th April 1811). 2 We designedly omit the employment of the word brass " to qualify these nstruments. The substance which determines the form of a column <_? air is demonstrably indifferent for the timbre or quality of tone so long ~s the sides of the tubes are equally elastic and rigid. Now these have utterly disappeared and pistons or rotary cylinders remain absolute masters of the situation. The invention of the piston is due to Stoelzel, a Silesian, and Blumel of Waldenburg (patent of 12th April 1818). It was first signalized by G. B. Bierey, leader of the National Theatre of Breslau, m No. 18 of the Allgcmcinc musikalischc Zeitung (Leipsic, 1815). The inventors first applied their discovery to the horn, trumpet, and trombone, and this application consisted of only two pistons, or " ventile," as they called them. We have seen up to this point that chromatic intervals were produced in instruments with cupped mouthpiece by shortenings of the tube by means of lateral openings. It is evident that a column of air so cut off must be very inferior in sonorousness to one vibrating from the mouthpiece to the ex tremity of the bell ; this has been the capital defect of keyed instru ments. Stoelzel and Blumel proceeded in contrary fashion : they produced chromatic intervals by lengthening the tube, just as in the trombone with slides. They introduced contrivances the move ment of which permitted an instantaneous communication between the principal tube and two additional tubes, lowering the instru ment respectively a tone and a half-tone, or by their simultaneous employment one tone and a half. As these combinations did not suffice to produce a complete chromatic scale, a third piston with an additional tube of a tone and a half was soon afterwards added by the inventors. Suppose an instrument giving without pistons the harmonics 2345678 by the employment of the second piston those sounds become by the first, by the third, or union of the first and second, by the union of the second and third, by the union of the first and third, by joining all three pistons, Here is the whole theory of the fingering of these instruments a pistons, of which the compass downwards is only bounded by the first harmonic. A serious defect exists, however, in these piston instruments, the want of truth of intonation whenever a note is produced by more than one piston. Let us take, for ex- -/t ample, the low G $2~ This note is produced, as we have just seen, by the union of the first and third pistons ; in employing the first piston the pitch of the instrument is lowered a major second, and to produce the lowering to a fourth (two tones and a half) a further lowering of a minor third (one_tone and a half) is necessary. Now the additional pipe to produce this lowering from C is neces sarily proportionately shorter than what is required for a pipe already lowered a tone by the employment of the first piston. It there fore results, as will be seen from this special case, that all notes produced by several pistons at one time are too high in pitch. The invention of Stoelzel and Blumel, like all new ideas, was not accepted with out opposition; FlG _ 6. Ophicleide notwithstanding its crushing superiority it ^.^ pistons, had a lively struggle to sustain, and it is only within the last thirty years that the system of keys has been