The British Bass Trombone in G

Throughout the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, the bass trombone professionally and popularly used in Britain and within the British sphere of influence was pitched in G, its long slide requiring the use of a handle. Its timbre is generally acknowledged to be distinctive, well distanced from the sound of a modern bass trombone. A bass trombone in G is a requirement for historically informed performance of British orchestral music written up to 1950 including the compositions of Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and others, also for brass band music of the same period. This paper discusses the evolution of G bass trombone design through the period of its regular use, in particular the replacement of early German-influenced models by French from the 1860s, drawing on a granular study of over one hundred extant examples in museums and private collections.