Double bass and bow attributed to Charles Plumerel, Mirecourt, 18th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Paris, 1844. Hector Berlioz sends the Grand traité d’instrumentation to press, and, having reached the last rung of the string family, he writes two lines as dry as an inventory: three-string double basses are tuned in fifths, four-string ones in fourths. Then he takes sides. The four-string instrument seems preferable to him chiefly for ease of execution, because tuning in fourths does not force the player to shift all over the neck just to play a scale. That is the whole reason, stated by a composer who did not play the double bass, and no one has put it better since.
Violin, viola and cello are tuned in fifths, and the double bass looks like the relative who refused to learn the house rule. The rule, however, is made for a human hand resting on a string of a certain length. On the violin the vibrating length is about 33 centimetres, on the cello about 70, on the double bass between 103 and 110 depending on size. The distances between notes grow in proportion. On a string 105 centimetres long a semitone near the nut takes up almost six centimetres, a whole tone more than eleven, a fifth about 35. A fourth asks for 26.
Here the hand comes in. In the technique codified by Franz Simandl, double bassist at the Vienna Court Opera, who published his method in 1881, in the lower positions the left hand uses only the first, second and fourth fingers, with the third working stuck to the fourth. Between the first finger and the little finger there is room for a tone, no more. On the D string, in first position, the fingers find E, F and F sharp. The next note, G, is the next open string, if that string lies a fourth above. If it lay a fifth above, G and G sharp would fall into empty space, between the hand and the following string, and to reach them the whole arm would have to move. Multiply that by every scale, every arpeggio, every fast passage in the symphonic repertoire, and it is the difference between playing and moving house. It is what Berlioz called shifting.
The history, before it arrived at today’s E, A, D, G, is full of attempts. The violone of eighteenth-century Vienna, the instrument of the concertos of Dittersdorf and Vanhal and of a lost Haydn concerto, was tuned in D major, A, D, F sharp, A, in thirds and fourths, often with frets on the neck. In France they played the three-string bass tuned in fifths, the one Berlioz rejected; in Italy Giovanni Bottesini built his career as a virtuoso on a three-string bass tuned A, D, G, that is, in fourths, and his concertos are often played with the solo tuning, all the strings raised a tone to make them sing. The four-string bass in fourths ended by prevailing in nineteenth-century orchestras: it was the instrument on which the increasingly mobile parts of symphonic writing, from Beethoven onwards, could be played without losing the way. Berlioz himself, in the same chapter, reproaches his colleagues for writing for the heaviest of instruments figures so fast that not even the cellos can render them.
The choice has a price. Tuned in fourths, the double bass does not have the same open strings as the cello, and the orchestra’s perfect fifths slip away beneath its fingers. The Canadian Joel Quarrington, an orchestral principal bass and the best-known advocate of tuning in fifths in the classical world, tunes C, G, D, A, an octave below the cello, and maintains that the instrument speaks more promptly and resonates more. He pays for the choice with more shifts of the hand, that is, in the very currency Berlioz wanted to save. In jazz Red Mitchell had done the same: they are famous exceptions precisely because they remain exceptions.
The rest of the orchestra has found a mechanical compromise. In many bass sections the E string is lengthened towards the scroll by an extension of wood and metal, with levers or stops that close by hand, because the repertoire asks to descend to the low C. It is the note an instrument tuned in fifths would have for free, as an open string. Double bass players prefer to buy it separately, and keep their fourths.