Next "Hot" player?

[josh_kaprun]

I apologize if my estimate seems too high (I'm not really great at estimating crowd number)...but the fact remains, there were more people at that recital than any other that I've ever been to (with the obvious exception being at ITEC where everyone goes to everything).

[OldsRecording]

I don't really mind listening to any solo instrument (the clarinet and the oboe are probably my least favorite, though).

Hmm..... Do yourself a favor and listen to the Vaughn-Williams Oboe Concerto and then kick yourself (and wish you could kick VW) for giving us the tuba concerto.

VW Oboe Concerto - Polished Jade
VW Tuba Concerto - Alley Cat

RC

I've always thought that the VW Concerto is one of those pieces that is ALMOST 'there'. If he could have done a second and third Tuba Concerti... (sigh)

[WakinAZ]

In the book about John Fletcher, an article he wrote about tuba solos echoes many of the posts in this thread. I also have about zero interest in listening to tuba solos. Shocker: the tuba is not really a solo instrument.

Yeah, play the hell of of the challenging licks and solo passages when you get 'em, but our primary mission is to provide a bass voice to an ensemble. You can sound great and be noticed without being the center of attention (or so I've been told ).

Eric "who thinks the purpose of many of the above-mentioned works is fodder for college recitals" L.

[TubaRay]

I say, "Life is short. Play your tuba naked!"
Doc

I don't think so! That tuba can be really cold.

[OldsRecording]

Doc wrote:

I say, "Life is short. Play your tuba naked!"
Doc

I don't think so! That tuba can be really cold.

And who the hell would want to see a tuba player naked??

Ken F.

Depends on the tuba player

[TubaRay]

Depends on the tuba player

You beat me to that one.

[Rick Denney]

We humans are driven by novelty. When something new appears that redefines for us what is possible, we are consumed by it until the next novelty appears. That next new thing goes beyond the thing we were just consumed by, rendering it no longer novel.

If modernism and post-modernism in the arts have a basic flaw, it's that they value innovation as the dominant element of creativity. and creativity as the dominant element of expression. We have lost touch with the notion that one can be expressive without being creative, and creative without smashing conventional wisdom. For me, this flaw is the confusion of fashion with art. Being new is more important than being beautiful. In whatever art has captured my interest at the moment, I'm usually driven away by the latest gimmick of expression for that reason.

C. S. Lewis thought the 20th Century was one of the key watershed periods in human history, because for the first time, we had a fundamental expectation of life that tomorrow would be better than today, and the next product would be better than the last. Aphorisms about the "old saw" have given way to those about the "new broom". Rulers are expected to be leaders, and life is expected to be fair. I think he's right and art reflects it. He used modern literature as an example in support of his point. But music is an even better example.

It is true that those expectations of continuous improvement are supported by technological advances, and that has shaped the way we all think about the world.

On the subject of Vaughan Williams: I wish he'd composed it in 1934 rather than 1954. I would rather it sound like Sancta Civitas, Job, or the 4th Symphony. Or in 1914, where it might sound like Norfolk Rhapsody. I think he waited until his strongest powers were somewhat depleted.

On the subject of tuba solo albums: Of the dozens of tuba solo albums I have in my collection ranging from Phillips to Baadsvik, only one can I play for non-tuba people and expect them to enjoy it without just being nice to me. And that's Sam Pilafian's first Travelin' Light album. All the rest are designed to demonstrate that the tuba can do things nobody thought could be done, not merely to lay down great music to be enjoyed for its own sake. Bobo was probably more true to that notion than most, but his choices are a bit too hip for my crowd. But my favorite is Gene Pokorny playing the Bach Flute Sonata on Tuba Tracks. He plays that beautifully enough to stand on its own, and perhaps be preferable to hearing it on flute.

But do I really need to hear Carnival of Venice or Four Seasons played on a tuba? It's exciting and impressive in a technical way for me as a tuba player. But if I wasn't a tuba player, I would still expect a more musical presentation on their original instruments.

Years ago, I was auditioning turntables at a stereo store. The owner of the store asked me to bring in a vinyl LP that I knew well for the audition. Thinking myself hip for doing so, I brought Bob Stewart's First Line Band. The owner listened a bit, and then asked me why I'd brought that particular album. I told him I knew it well, and he just looked at me. Finally, I admitted I was a tuba player. Only then did it make sense to him.

Rick "who has been roasted in the past for expressing such views" Denney

[Mark]

Just to put things into even sharper perspective, how many solo recitals would the latest tuba-player-du-jour-with-an-unpronouncable-name be playing if it wasn't for states' monies paying for sparsely-attended free-admission recitals on state university campuses?

I did a little research this fall on what some guest artists cost. For a top tier artist (e.g. Yo-Yo Ma), I doubt that even the larger orchestras will break even on the concert. So, something other than tickets sales is funding the concert.

[Mark]

You're hip enough to know that ticket sales almost never cover the full cost of symphony orchestra concerts, and sometimes barely covers the cost of solo/chamber concerts...(??)

I realize I wasn't clear. What I meant was: I don't think that ticket sales will cover the cost of the guest artist. If a tuba artists gets $1,500 (I suspect that may be just a tad low, but not a lot low.) what is the cost per audience memeber compared to the top violin, cello, piano artist that may well get $150,000?

BTW, I'm not disagreeing with you original point. I firmly believe that orchestras, solo recitals, whatever, should be self-supporting. This can include private donations. I do wish the government would stay out of it though.

[keronarts]

One point of clarification here is that I do indeed think of Pavarotti, Bobo, etc all very much as Artists -- with a capital "A". In their own time, very much individualized, classical types of genuinely GREAT interpretive artists. And the world had long depended on such individuals to define itself culturally and intellectually. After all, without them we'd never have any of the pieces of the original composers and bask in their world of intentionality were it not for the latter day interpretation of the current performers. This is VERY much a performer's interpretive art and will be. Those people were products of the idealism of their time and the foundation on which they had to dream and build. But the performance art is indeed a valid individualized art form in itself. Tubas especially, among the wind instruments of the orchestra, had long been neglected as a valid self-developing art form and medium. Bill Bell was such a huge innovator in the field because of his on-running contention that the tuba could also have solo potential. Toscannini's consideration of Bell as the world's greatest tuba player was certainly no small accident, but when no one else was thinking of the instrument as anything more than part of the sonic background, a soloistic -- or potentially soloistic -- voice from there, this new concept began to emerge. And it has certainly been said MANY times that solo careers are just around the corner, the days of the great individual tuba player are about to emerge ... etc, etc ... most EVERYONE most closely associated with the business who doesn't have the dexterity of a Harvey Phillips or Tommy Johnson [along with all the lucky breaks they were able to forge for themselves ...] is going to say almost RIGHT AWAY that, if you are going to make a living playing the tuba, you're going to have to have to play in an orchestra. Almost first and foremost among these is Roger Bobo. And when you really disect his sound concept, it's always been to me that of a fine, FINE orchestral player -- who thought of the tuba MUCH more as an extension of the brighter focused trombone sound than so many more of today's players who seem to go for the big round bottom sound, clarified and heightened to the point where it can stand alone, or in small group context. Sure, he won't probably be duplicated any time, but neither would Jimi Hendrix. Who would dare to try to play that way today? Who would HAVE to? They already did it. Trail blazing is also a vital part of performance development over time, and that's probably the core of this issue.

But if it were not for the special sound that Pavarotti, Bobo, Hendrix [who interpreted his time rather than someone else's ideas of sounds organization ...], any number of others brought to their interpretive art, all that we would have is the interstitial silence, or maybe just legions of shower singers somehow trying to hone the visions that these type of break-through guys actually did. Not that that silence in itself is not refreshing [in Cage's piece 4'33", time period to let the audience drink in the accidental sounds coming in from the audience, outside the hall, or wherever they occurred? .... the point being, you CAN'T altogether eliminate sound, and certainly not intentionality -- when we perceive that and somehow capture it, we're "doing art" ... or the things of art, well "art happens" ...]. Tailored and honed instrumental or vocal sounds in any medium -- pop, jazz, classical -- all have their own unique stable of sounds that make them THEM. That's what we like about them and keep coming back to with them, also. It's the greater visualization process of getting the malleable plastic medium at hand to conform to the idealized mental image of the same thing-process. And there will always be a personalized touch in the delivery of any classic piece of music that we listen to. That's part of the design. Still, what should come through is the intentionality of the composer and the original bouquet of ideas that got the whole thing to fly in the first place, and when that continued freshness endures over years, decades, perhaps centuries, then we indeed have a classic on our hands. But how's that intention supposed to come through, except for the CONSTANT necessary process of continuous performance? Horns change, fashions change, times change .... and here we are.

Here in America, our great individual artist, who will stand with Beethoven, Rembrandt, daVinci, Mozart, Michaelangelo and the all time greats is Frank Lloyd Wright. Now he had the Chicago fire of 1871 to help him get started, but architecture used to be about walls and floors and roofs and windows, etc. Now it's about spaces, space planning, and hearing them talk to each other. Marry the functionality of what happens in the space to the building elements that describe it and enable it, and you have the current incarnation of "architecture". That's also Wright, more than anyone else in the last 300 years. Architectural curricula the world over are built on that. He not only said and did things VERY well, but he came at a crucial time and so could be hugely influential. Like the Beatles. Put them 10 years earlier or 10 years later and they would have nowhere NEAR the lasting influence that they did. But in the culture that World War II spawned, that was largely based on American-Russian political/ military/ economic hegemony in the late 1940's, there came with it too a geographic shift artistically, intellectually, and culturally to the USA and particularly the greater New York area. Within just a few miles of each other you had Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, David Diamond, Roy Harris, John Cage [not to mention of course Bill Bell and the the budding school of tuba playing fanatics ....] in classical music; Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Theolonius Monk, John Coltrane in jazz; Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Lerner, Frederick Lowe & the whole golden age of Broadway; Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollack, Willem deKooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Clifford Styll, Mark Rothko and the NY Expressionist School; Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer and their whole literary circle of the Beats and all the intergenerational variants that followed; whole schools of
European emigres who escaped from Europe and sought shelter here -- earlier, Einstein, Oppenheimer and the pathfinders of modern physics and science, and then Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, etc. Countless minor artists caught up in and becoming part of the modern movement that was that art world. Now that force of creative energy as a firestorm quickly spread elsewhere, and the nascent pop culture of the late 50s and 60s reached out to not just blend with, but to steam-roll and all but bury cultures EVERYWHERE as the new be-all and end-all. Like an army of ants, it stormed over the entire planet, so that almost everything today somehow seems to be a function of that wave. Part of that wave is of course the tuba contribution .... and people like Harvey, Bobo, Abe Torchinsky, Toby Hanks, Joe Novotny, Ron Bishop, etc are very much the early part of that tuba wave ... that's in turn part of the REALLY HUUGGGEEE wave ....

And it's not just one individual source for that ideal, but almost like the effect of a greater swarm of some kind. Much like the way insects swarm or other natural forces move with the river in which they find themselves. It's washed over the entire planet time and time again since then. One only needs look at China since the 1970s for proof positive of this. In 1975 the last days of chairman Mao still had the bamboo curtain up and West was West, and they didn't want any part of it. Then Deng Xiao Ping declared that "to be rich was to be glorious" and the floodgate opened and never closed. They still have perhaps the most dynamic economy today, as they have for over 20 years, all feverishly copying their concept of being American or being modern -- which seem to be fairly synonymous. If it's Western they fall all over themselves to taste it, savor it, possess it, consume it, live it. 4000+ years of their own history and they run past it like it wasn't even there, to make even interior smaller cities [like Chongjow, up the Yangtze River] seem more like Times Square than Times Square is, for God's sake! Even at the Van Cliburn piano competition within the last couple of years, I think, in Texas, five of the twelve finalists were from China! They're into EVERYTHING, make no mistake about it. And this is NOT -- I repeat NOT -- such a good thing! But we're swept along by some sort of a wave that is our modern pop culture, that threatens to decimate everything in its path. It has many variants, like the in-and-now vs soon-to-become tuba presence discussed in this thread ... and too often it seems that people either don't recognize where this force arose from -- or that it EVEN IS A FORCE -- and how really relatively recent a phenomenon it is. But it is a cultural tsunami unlike almost anything else in history -- and in many ways a REALLY DANGEROUS one too.

But that greater wave of activity, where reality is not so much defined by the ideals of one individual in many types of artistic and cultural endeavor, seems to more and more define what music is about, how people play, react to it, define themselves in front of it. I don't even know if it would be possible for one individual person to wrap their arms around all that is tuba-dom -- I don't care who they think they are -- and pretend to assert to everyone else that it should somehow be done "their way". It seems more and more that the time for individuals to move history is increasingly less and less possible. Part of one of the great paradoxes of the 60s as an age of special interests -- when everyone becomes their own special interest, they tend to blend into some greater fabric so that, at best, areas of color and intent, rather than specific individualized hues, become more apparent. Whoever is "the next bomb" in the tuba world might just be someone, or some smaller collection of players, whose instruments and playing style represent an area of thinking or intention ..... rather than some individual perhaps even unwillingly thrust up on some pedestal to be the current poster child of the profession.

[sloan]

When I have commented in the past about some tubists taking themselves too seriously, I always got **** over it.

Just to put things into even sharper perspective, how many solo recitals would the latest tuba-player-du-jour-with-an-unpronouncable-name be playing if it wasn't for states' monies paying for sparsely-attended free-admission recitals on state university campuses?

Thanks for reminding us of the debt we owe to state government for making these events possible.