The first of three movements, or passages as Mr Norgard calls them, opens with the glittering sounds of violins and piccolos, before dropping suddenly towards the growling depths of contrabass trombone and contrabass tuba.
Double bass, also called contrabass, string bass, bass, bass viol, bass fiddle, or bull fiddle French contrebasse, German Kontrabass, stringed musical instrument, the lowest-pitched member of the violin family, sounding an octave lower than the cello.
His later works include A Pierre: Dell'azzurro silenzio, inquietum for bass flute, contrabass clarinet, and live electronics (1985) and No hay caminos, hay que caminar, a tribute to the director Andrey Tarkovsky, for orchestra (1987).
The deeper-pitched saxhorns remain regular brass band instruments in France, Great Britain, and the United States, where they are not known as saxhorns but simply as alto in E♭ (in Britain, tenor horn), tenor in B♭ (baritone), the wider-bore baritone in B♭ (euphonium), and bass in E♭ and contrabass in BB♭ (sometimes called tubas).
Later a BB♭ (double B-flat) contrabass became available.
Subsequent designs were considerably influenced by the French contrabass saxhorn.
The bass and contrabass saxhorns in E♭ and BB♭ are also sometimes referred to as tubas.
In the 20th century the mandolin was built in a family of sizes from soprano to contrabass.
Likewise, having Lenny Pickett's contrabass sarrusophone honking hippo-like in the depths of a ragtime blues arrangement of Bessie Smith's "Easy Come, Easy Go" brilliantly evokes the hedonist splendour of lines like "Don't want to be a skinny vamp or nothin' like that/My daddy always knows where it's at".
Rather cheekily, it's the contrabass – dazzlingly played here by the Slovakian Roman Patkolo – who gruffly gets to whisper most of the sweet nothings to his amorous partner – Anne-Sophie Mutter.
