The euphonium's name means sweet-voiced, but Americans kept calling it a baritone
The euphonium takes its name from a Greek word for pleasant-sounding, and its warm tenor voice is a brass band staple. Yet in the United States it spent a century being confused with the baritone, partly thanks to German immigrant instrument makers. Its ancestry runs back through a snake-shaped horn called the serpent.
A euphonium is a valved brass instrument with a wide conical bore, pitched in B-flat an octave below the trumpet, with about nine feet of tubing. It belongs to the valved bugle family alongside the tuba and flugelhorn. Most have four compensating piston valves, though rotary-valve versions are common in Central and Eastern Europe. British brass bands write for it in treble clef as a transposing instrument, while American scores may use treble, bass or both.
Low brass was long a problem. Before valves arrived in the 1820s, a brass player was limited to one harmonic series, a slide, or keyed tone holes. Bass trombones were clumsy in fast passages and the serpent's tone drew complaints. In 1817 the Paris maker Jean Hilaire Asté developed the ophicleide, an all-metal keyed instrument whose broad bore gave the warm, noble sound the euphonium would inherit; it stayed in use in some bands into the 1870s. Then came a run of valve inventions, above all François Périnet's modern piston valve in 1839, which, with industrial manufacturing, transformed brass design.
Ferdinand Sommer patented his instrument in Berlin in 1844 as the Euphonion, and after he toured it in the 1850s Britain adopted it as the euphonium. British composers sometimes call it a tenor tuba. Its relative, the British baritone horn, has a narrower bore and smaller bell and often lacks the fourth valve.
In America the terms blurred. The common German name, Baryton, may have influenced the English usage as German musicians and makers arrived in the 19th century. A Lyon and Healy catalogue from 1894 sold near-identical instruments as tenor, baritone and bass, differing only in bore and bell. School marching bands spent most of the 20th century playing three-valve baritones, and directors and composers routinely lumped them together with euphoniums.
Source: Euphonium
