A bass brasswind instrument developed from the bass-horn by the Rev. Joseph Rogerson Cotter, vicar of Castlemagner, Co. Cork, and patented by him in 1823. The patent, in which the name hibernicon does not occur, covers two sizes, a bass and a tenor; only the former is known to have been made.
The sole surviving hibernicon, in the Bate Collection, Oxford, is of brass and has a sounding length of 5 metres, with a bore that increases steadily from 1·3 cm at the mouthpiece receiver to 6cm at the root of the bell, whence it flares to 24·5 cm (see illustration). It has eight closed-standing keys. It stands in 16' C (C'); however, it appears not to have been intended primarily to be a contrabass using the pedal notes (as do the serpent, bass-horn and ophicleide), but to play in the bass register from round C upwards. Its inventor claimed it was the sole instrument ‘with only six holes capable of giving the whole chromatic scale for two octaves or more’, not strictly true since the keyed bugle does so similarly.
Its use was brief. The Edinburgh Wind Instrument Society sold their bass hibernicon in 1840. The only known instance of its use in a major festival orchestra was at the 1835 York Festival. Reporting for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Pellisov wrote:
… and another contrabass trumpet called ‘Hibernicon’ which, like a Goliath, towered heavenwards above the rest of the ophicleides: it was supported on a folding tripod and played by a seated performer. Such is the power of this Hibernicon that the trumpets at the walls of Jericho, nay the last trump itself would be as child’s play to it.
See also Bass-horn.
REGINALD MORLEY-PEGGE/ARNOLD MYERS