Welcome back! This week, we’re going to continue with our recent topic, delving into the history of yet another pivotal member of the band. The instrument we will be looking at this week has been around for centuries, but has gone through a number of changes, even existing in a few different forms today, including upright, acoustic, and electric. Some versions can be played vertically, others horizontally. Some people consider it a part of the violin family, most others think of it as a kind of guitar, but the truth is it isn’t really a member of either family. Yes, that’s right, this week we’re looking into the history of the bass.

For an instrument that is now considered a fundamental part of most modern popular music, the bass started out as something quite different. The story of the bass begins at just about the same time and place as pretty much every other stringed instrument: Upper Italy, around 500 years ago. In fact, the earliest known illustration of an upright bass-like instrument dates back from 1516, and in 1493 Bernardino Prospero, the Ferrarese chancellor of Isabella d’Este wrote of musicians playing “viols as big as I.” But this general description of their origins is unfortunately about as good as musicians and historians can get. The reality of the evolution of the early bass is mired in a complicated web of changes in design, fashion, the number of strings, tuning techniques, and even the very dimensions of the instrument itself. We do know the deep voice of the bass was first found among the viola da gamba family of stringed instruments. In fact, the bass is the only instrument from that family the remains in use today. In 1542, Venetian musician and author Silvestro Ganassi developed a bass viola da gamba in his native Venice. This instrument, designed with sloping shoulders, a fretted neck, and six strings, is most often regarded as the forebearer of the modern bass. Not long after, Michael Praetorius, a German organist, music theorist, and generally considered to be one of the most versatile composers of his time, described a viola da gamba sub-bass, a five-stringed instrument that stood a monstrous eight feet tall and was tuned in a similar fashion to today’s upright basses. Praetorius made special note of how the musician playing the oversized instrument had to read the normal base line notations, even though the sound that was actually being produced was a full octave lower, an oddity of the instrument that survives even today. Another interesting aspect of Praetorius’s description of this early bass is that its design seemed patterned more after the shape of the violin, rather than the viol. The neck was fretted, a design feature that wouldn’t be abandoned until about 1800, and the bow was held and handled underhand, similar to the style of play for upright basses today.

Throughout the early Baroque period of the 1600s the bass was utilized only occasionally. At this point in history it had thick, heavy guts strings, and its sheer size made it impossible for use in anything smaller than a church. Just stringing and tuning the behemoth was described as “a labour fit for a horse.” Luckily for the bass, new over wound gut strings were introduced in the 1650s, effectively saving the upright bass from an early and nearly inevitable extinction. These new, thinner strings made it easier to finger and bow, and allowed instrument makers to reduce the unwieldy size without compromising the extra octave it could produce. In fact, modern versions of the bass are only about ¾ the size of these original monsters.

Yet, even with advances in technology, the bass still toiled in relative obscurity, with few composer giving it a second thought, and most of its players possessing less than stellar talent. This all changed in the late 1700s, with Domenico Dragonetti, the first real prodigy for the instrument, and the man responsible for helping it earn its permanent place in the orchestra. Dragonetti was a force in the music world of his time, his relationships with composers (like Beethoven himself) were the stuff myths are made of. His fame and skill with the bass were so great that conductors would often seat him next to the leading first-violin player, where he would not only give the audience a spectacular show, but where he would also enjoyed the privilege of playing the violin or cello parts at his own discretion. It was this influence that saw the symphonic and operatic bass parts taken from the cello, and given to the bass not long after Dragonetti’s demise in 1846.

Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, the bass went through a number of different styles and designs, many of which were used at the same time. The number of strings fluctuated between 3, 4, and 5, and the very shape and size of the instrument was subject to experimentation. One such Frankensteinian creation was Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume’s 1849 three stringed “Octobasse,” a 13 foot tall mutant bass that required two men to play. But despite the many variations and experimentations, it wasn’t until the late 19th and 20th centuries that the bass finally found its modern voice and its limits. From the late 1800s onward, untold numbers of composers and musicians created countless concerti, pieces, and methods for playing the upright bass. One of these men, Sergei Koussevitsky (who would go on to become a distinguished conductor of the Boston Symphony) added more solo compositions than any other, and his work is now the standard for the instrument. But by the early 1900s a new form of music had taken notice of the upright bass, jazz.

In the last ten years of the 19th century the earliest of the New Orleans jazz bands used tubas or sousaphones to supply their bass lines, but as the bands moved away from marching and into bars and brothels, the upright bass became the perfect instrument to replace the bass line brass instruments. With this new style of music came a few new ways to play the bass, all still used today. The first is called “walking” which involves scale-based bass lines that outlined harmony. Another of these new styles of playing was called the “slap style,” which came about out of pure necessity, as an unamplified upright bass is usually the quietest instrument in a jazz ensemble. This “slap style” involves actually slapping and pulling at the strings to produce a rhythmic and literal slapping sound against the fingerboard. This style of play has the advantage of producing a sound that can cut through the sound of the rest of the band much better than plucking the strings. But jazz didn’t just help create new fingering techniques, it also introduced audiences to the bass’s ability to improvise; every member of the jazz band is expected to be able to improvise an accompanying lines or solo, regardless of the instrument they play.

The bass’s story is long and full of changes and left turns, but we haven’t even hinted at the biggest change yet: electrical amplification. Next week we’ll continue our look at the bass’s emergence into modern music, and the way changes in its design and manner of play have changed the face of music forever.