Marching brass 1980s and early 1990s, DEG Music Products commissioned Willson Brass of Switzerland to design a Euphonium bugle, and their design used a medium shank mouthpiece that is not regularly seen in the United States. The contrabass bugle, or "contra", is the bugle equivalent of a marching tuba and its variants (the sousaphone and helicon). This bugle was designed in the 1960s. The original design for a contrabass called for an instrument in CC (the equivalent tubing length of a CC tuba), carried in front of the marcher like the higher voices. This was quickly replaced with a shoulder carried variant
The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down Wilson and Byrne, were modular white squares resembling Japanese shoji screens that moved fluidly to redefine the space for each scene. Byrne's music, however, took its inspiration not from Japan but from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band of New Orleans. The instrumentation was for a brass ensemble, and incorporated a number of traditional tunes, including "In the Upper Room", "Social Studies (The Gift of Sound)", "Theadora is Dozing", and "Things to Do (I've Tried)". New York Times critic John Rockwell wrote "The 'plot' traces the transformation of a tree into a boat into a book into a tree again, almost