While Adolphe Sax imitated its upturned metal bell in his design of the larger saxophones, the two instruments are fundamentally different.

[citation needed] Most modern Boehm system bass clarinets have an "extension" key allowing them to play to the (written) E♭.

This key was originally added to allow easy transposition of parts for the relatively rare bass clarinet pitched in A, but it now finds significant use in concert band and other literature.

In recent years, the bass clarinet has also seen a growing repertoire of solo literature including compositions for the instrument alone, or accompanied by piano, orchestra, or other ensemble.

Two years later, Giacomo Meyerbeer wrote an important solo for bass clarinet in Act 4 of his opera Les Huguenots.

French composer Hector Berlioz was one of the first of the Romantics to use the bass clarinet in his large-scale works such as the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, Op.

Later French composers to use the instrument included Maurice Ravel, who wrote virtuosic parts for the bass clarinet in his ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912), La valse (1920), and his orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1924).

The instrument plays an extensive role in Tristan und Isolde (1859), the operas of Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), and Parsifal (1882).

Also around this time, Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt wrote important parts for the instrument in his symphonic poems Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne (What One Hears on the Mountain), Tasso, and his Dante Symphony.

Giuseppe Verdi followed suit, using it in Ernani, Aida (1870), La forza del destino, Simon Boccanegra, Don Carlo and Falstaff.

Following in Verdi's footsteps, Giacomo Puccini, composer of La Bohème, Tosca and Madame Butterfly, used the bass clarinet in all of his operas, beginning with Edgar in 1889.

Strauss wrote for the instrument as he did for the smaller clarinets, and the parts often include playing in very high registers, such as in Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op.

Igor Stravinsky also wrote complex parts for the instrument throughout his career, most prominently in his ballets The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913).

In the duet "A Boy Like That" from West Side Story (1957), Leonard Bernstein scored for "the inky sounds of three bass clarinets".

[7] Early minimalist Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians (1976) calls for two bass clarinets, featured prominently in the lower register.

Used almost percussively, the effect of deep, staccato repetitions, played beneath a static rhythmic drone, is to create a feeling of slowly fluctuating cycles.

In addition to Horák, other specialist performers include Henri Bok (Netherlands), his student Luís Afonso (Brazil), Dennis Smylie (United States), Tommie Lundberg (Sweden), Harry Sparnaay (Netherlands, who has worked with important composers such as Luciano Berio, Iannis Xenakis, and Morton Feldman), Fie Schouten (artistic director Basklarinet Festijn; worked with o.a.

Initiators and artistic leaders are former students of Sparnaay and active in contemporary composed and improvised music: Fie Schouten and Tobias Klein.

Rocco Parisi's Bass Clarinet Quartet is an Italian group whose repertoire includes transcriptions of music by Rossini, Paganini, and Piazzolla.

However, avant-garde musician Eric Dolphy (1928–1964) was the first major jazz soloist on the instrument, and established much of the vocabulary and technique used by later performers.

While the bass clarinet has been used often since Dolphy, it is typically used by a saxophonist or clarinetist as a second or third instrument; such musicians include David Murray, Marcus Miller, John Surman, John Gilmore, Bob Mintzer, John Coltrane (to whom Dolphy's mother left some of Dolphy's instruments including his bass clarinet),[citation needed] Brian Landrus, James Carter, Steve Buckley, Andy Biskin, Don Byron, Julian Siegel, Gunter Hampel, Michel Portal, Myron Walden, Yusef Lateef, Paul McCandless, Gianluigi Trovesi, and Chris Potter.

[20] The Mascara Snake (Victor Hayden) was a member of Captain Beefheart's band in the late 1960s, playing bass clarinet on the 1969 album Trout Mask Replica.

On Steely Dan's 1980 song "Babylon Sisters", bass clarinets are played by George Marge and Walter Kane.

The article has frequently been cited as the earliest record of a bass clarinet, but it has more recently been suggested that the basse-tube was in fact a basset horn.

[26] The Klarinetten-Bass by Heinrich Grenser, c. 1793, had a folded, bassoon-like shape and an extended range, and was presumably intended to serve as a bassoon replacement in military bands.

Additional designs were developed by many other makers, including Dumas of Sommières (who called his instrument a "Basse guerrière") in 1807; Nicola Papalini, c. 1810 (an odd design, in the form of a serpentine series of curves, carved out of wood); George Catlin of Hartford, Connecticut ("clarion") c. 1810; Sautermeister of Lyons ("Basse-orgue") in 1812; Gottlieb Streitwolf in 1828; and Catterino Catterini ("glicibarifono") in the 1830s.

[22][23] Finally, Adolphe Sax, a Belgian manufacturer of musical instruments, designed a straight-bodied form of the bass clarinet in 1838.