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Double bass · 6 min read

A short history of the double bass

The double bass is the violin family's odd relative, descended partly from viols. Dragonetti, Bottesini and Koussevitzky pulled it out of the back row.

2026-07-03

The family it did not quite join

Look at a double bass next to a cello and the differences are structural, not just scale. The shoulders slope away from the neck instead of turning square. The back is often flat with a bend across the upper bout rather than carved into an arch. The tuning is in fourths. The bow can be held underhand. All four of those are viol traits, and none of them are violin traits.

The viols, or viola da gamba family, flourished across Europe through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alongside the emerging violin family. They had flat backs, sloping shoulders, frets of gut tied around the neck, and were tuned largely in fourths. The largest of them, the violone, was the ancestor that survived. When the violin family displaced the viols elsewhere, the bass end of the orchestra kept the older design, because at that size the flat back and sloping shoulders were simply more practical to build and to reach around.

The result is a hybrid. The modern double bass has a violin-family bridge, soundpost, bass bar and general method of construction, but wears a viol's outline. Organologists argue about which family it belongs to, which tells you something about how ambiguous the answer is.

No standard instrument for a very long time

For most of its history there was no agreement about how many strings a bass should have or how they should be tuned. Three-string basses were common in Italy and in France, tuned variously; four-string instruments with different tunings coexisted; Viennese basses of the eighteenth century used five strings in a tuning full of thirds that made certain chords easy and modern fingerings impossible. Composers writing for bass had to know which instrument they would get.

This is one reason the orchestral bass part was, for a long time, simply the cello part played an octave lower. Doubling the cello line asks less of an instrument you cannot make assumptions about. Beethoven is usually credited with beginning to write genuinely independent bass parts, most visibly in the recitative passages in the finale of the ninth symphony, which bass sections have been complaining about ever since.

The four-string instrument tuned in fourths only became standard through the nineteenth century, and the low extension or fifth string came later still, in response to composers writing below the open E.

Dragonetti and Bottesini

Domenico Dragonetti, born in Venice in 1763, was the first bassist to become genuinely famous as a soloist. He spent most of his career in London, where he played for some fifty years, and by all accounts produced a sound of extraordinary power on a three-string instrument with a heavy underhand bow. He knew Beethoven and Haydn, and the story that Beethoven's independent writing for the bass owes something to hearing Dragonetti play is at least plausible.

Giovanni Bottesini, born in 1821, is the other name everyone learns. He came to the bass by accident, taking it up because a conservatory scholarship happened to be open for that instrument, and turned it into a solo voice. He played with an overhand bow on a three-string instrument tuned high with light strings, wrote concertos and a great many showpieces still used as solo repertoire, conducted, and composed operas. He directed the premiere of Verdi's Aida in Cairo in 1871.

Both men changed what other players thought possible. The repertoire they left is still how young bassists prove they can play.

Koussevitzky, and the twentieth century

Serge Koussevitzky, born in 1874 in Russia, is the third figure in the standard list, and his career took the strangest turn. He built a reputation as a bass virtuoso, toured widely, and wrote a concerto that remains one of the few substantial concertos in the instrument's repertoire, though there is a long-running question about how much of it was written by his colleague Reinhold Glière.

He then largely stopped playing and became a conductor, eventually leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a quarter of a century and commissioning an extraordinary amount of new music. Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra exists because Koussevitzky commissioned it. So does a good deal of the American repertoire of the period. He founded what became Tanglewood.

After him the instrument diverged. In jazz, players including Jimmy Blanton and later Scott LaFaro and Charles Mingus turned the bass into a melodic and improvising voice rather than a timekeeper. In classical music, composers began writing solo works that treated the bass as an instrument with its own colours instead of a quiet cello.

A few things worth knowing

The bass sounds an octave lower than it is written, which is why the parts look higher on the page than they sound. This is a practical convention to avoid endless ledger lines below the staff.

It is the only instrument in the orchestra routinely played standing up or perched on a high stool, and the only one where two different bow designs are both fully standard. It is also the only orchestral string instrument whose players commonly pluck as their primary technique, in jazz, and bow as their primary technique, in orchestra, depending on which world they live in.

Names vary by country and context: double bass, contrabass, upright bass, string bass, bass fiddle, or simply bass. They all mean the same instrument. Players in Singapore will hear most of these used interchangeably in any given week.

Frequently asked

Is the double bass part of the violin family?

Partly. Its construction, bridge, soundpost and bass bar follow violin-family practice, but its sloping shoulders, frequently flat back and fourths tuning come from the viols. Scholars genuinely disagree about how to classify it, and the honest answer is that it is a hybrid that took useful features from both families.

Who was the first famous double bass soloist?

Domenico Dragonetti, a Venetian born in 1763 who spent most of his long career in London. He was known for an enormous sound on a three-string bass played with a heavy underhand bow, and he moved in the same circles as Haydn and Beethoven. Bottesini followed a generation later.

Why does the double bass sound lower than written?

It is a transposing convention. Bass parts are written an octave above their sounding pitch so the notes stay on and around the bass clef instead of sitting several ledger lines below it. The same convention applies to the bass guitar and to the contrabassoon.

Keep reading

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Published 2026-07-03 by A&G Academy · Accordion Singapore

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