A couple folks mentioned in another thread that they also play tuba. I thought it might be interesting (for certain values of “interesting”) to share some tuba geekery. What do you play, what kind of horn, what groups, etc. (The Great Ongoing Tuba Thread? Nah.)
I play a Miraphone Perinet in BBb; four upright valves and kind of smallish. I also have a silver Eb tuba made by Buescher in 1910, but it needs a valve job. ( well, of course it does- it’s over 100 years old) Every so often, I borrow a sousaphone from my teaching gig at the high school. A brass one.
I play mostly dixieland, but have just gotten into a brass quintet that’s forming. I’ll play concert band occasionally at the local community college. Once I was in a band that performed the Miles Davis album The Birth Of The Cool, but we didn’t perform much and it fell apart. That was a tough part, but fun.
My newest tuba related success is that I organized and conducted a TubaChristmas event last winter. Woo Hoo!
Okay, who’s next? What’s** TubaDiva** up to these days?
Junior Barbarian is a tuba-ist, plays in the school orchestra, a quintet, a state student band and a state youth symphony. (Had to drop a community brass orchestra… no time.) Will be looking for scholarships on the big horn shortly. (Didja know Yale has a tuba scholarship these days?)
But that’s when he’s not playing trombone, upright or electric bass in two jazz ensembles, or piano to annoy us, or accordion when he wants to get thrown out of the house.
He doesn’t hang here but I may lurk on his behalf.
I like to tell folks that I played first bass at every football game, back in high school.
And I’ve probably told this story here before… but one year, at the high school Christmas concert. The show mostly consisted of the same tunes we’d been practicing all semester, but the director figured, hey, it’s a Christmas concert, we need to have a few Christmas songs. So he picked up some super-easy arrangements, intended for middle school band. All quarter notes, no accidentals, you get the picture. In fact, the music was so easy that he was confident we didn’t even need to rehearse it.
Well, he was probably right: It really was that easy. Except for one little snag: No middle-school band has a tuba, so the music didn’t include any tuba part. I had to use baritone music, instead. Which isn’t so bad, after all: That’s exactly one octave above a tuba, easy to transpose.
Or at least, easy to transpose if you have a little bit of time. But I was seeing it for the first time at the concert, and trying to transpose on the fly. Which meant I was only able to transpose the notes I was able to recognize at a glance, which means the notes that a tubist might occasionally actually play. In other words, about the bottom half of the baritone’s standard range. And of course, for the other notes, I didn’t play anything at all, because obviously silence is better than a wrong note.
It wasn’t until after the concert was over that one of my friends pointed out the monstrosity I’d birthed. Because that night, the Benedictine High School auditorium saw the world’s first, and God willing last, performance of the Ave Maria Polka.
Heh.
Did you consider playing them without transposing – I.e. playing the entire Baritone Horn part 1 octave lower than originally intended? With a simplistic Junior High School arrangement, the baritone horn was probably playing the bass line anyway.
There was a Cocoa Puffs commercial in the late 1970s/early 1980s in which Sonny the Cuckoo Bird was playing the tuba. (In a futile attempt to distract himself from going Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, of course.)
At the end, we got this exchange:
SONNY: “How’s my tuba playing?”
KIDS: “Like a tuba toothpaste!”
It’s now the first thing that comes to mind when anyone mentions a tuba.
Sousa is fine. What’s really boring is Copland. I remember one piece of his, that had something like 54 straight measures of rest for the tuba, then a single measure of a whole note, and then 43 more measures of rest before the next sound.
Clearly one of us is misunderstanding the meaning of some word, because I thought that’s what transposing was. Every note that I played, I played exactly one octave lower than a bari would have. I just couldn’t sight-read the high notes quickly enough to do that, because those notes would never show up on a part written for tuba.
Oh, and strictly speaking, a “tuba” is any brass instrument with a conical bore (that is to say, the diameter of the tubing increases continually along the length of the instrument). A trumpet is not a tuba, since it’s got a cylindrical bore (constant diameter all the way up to the start of the bell), but the almost-interchangeable cornet is a tuba.
Oh – I thought you meant you were playing them an octave higher than written, so that they’d sound at the same pitch (and in the same octave) as though they were played by a baritone horn. In other words, I thought you were transposing the written music, not transposing the intended pitches.
Interesting. They don’t write tuba parts that reach up into the tenor clef? (I’m assuming that tuba parts in the bass clef always sound 1 octave lower than written, just like they do for a string bass.)
Nope. Tuba music is written in the octave it’s played. That means a lot of ledger lines below the staff. Tuba music can go much higher than the staff, but they pretty much just stick with bass clef.
A cornet can be a type of tuba, a flugelhorn definitely is.
Actually, there is no “Oom Pa Oom” in John Philip Sousa.
Tuba is like any other instrument: It can be witty, profound, gentle, fiery, loud, soft. It’s all in the player. We have some monumental tuba players on the scene and we stand on the shoulders of our mentors and teachers who were themselves great.
Here’s an example of some fresh new jazz tuba, just released:
From Howard Johnson and Gravity!, go get your copy, it’s great.
Buddy in second row with glasses and white shirt was playing what looked like a sort of mini tuba with angled horn. Never seen that before. Is it also just called a tuba? The girl behind him in the green dress was definitely rockin’ out.
The New World Symphony. Where you sit like a lump for almost all of it, there’s like only 16 measures of tuba in the whole freaking thing. And it’s all the same line as the bass trombone too.
Are you still playing, Chronos? I hope so, even if it’s only TubaChristmas (but I hope you’re doing more.)
Your humble TubaDiva
(who did two TubaChristmases this year, hooray!)
The guy in the second row was playing a Wagner Tuba. It’s usually played by French Horn players for some Wagner pieces. Behind him next to the rockin’ girl is a guy playing a Tornister Tuba. basically a travel tuba. Tiny size, same notes.
You can play up there if you practice at it. And especially if you don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it, which is what some tuba players hear a lot.
Here’s an example.
Though yes, the tuba is more known for playing way down low. Here's Derek Fenstermacher, tuba player with the New Jersey Symphony:
Here’s some beatboxing, courtesy of Nat McIntosh (also some cool multiphonics):
