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I'm playing the on stage tuba part in several months and want to get a hold of the part. Any suggestions as to where I could get the part? The librarian for the Opera won't have the part prepared for a while.

Thanks!

I have a copy I can xerox and send you.

bttmbow@yahoo.com

Chris H., METoperaNY

Scott Sutherland wrote:I'm playing the on stage tuba part in several months and want to get a hold of the part. Any suggestions as to where I could get the part? The librarian for the Opera won't have the part prepared for a while.

Thanks!

Ouch! Get practicing - this is one of the hardest things I've ever had to learn!

Cheers,

Jeff Miller

Once at a brass band concert we played The Bombastic Bombardon.

The announcer was a very famous, but by then retired, operatic sub-bass singer.

He had been provided a script, but digressed at his own liking, which created a lot of fun.

When he announced the said tuba solo, he told that the original stage band of Wozzeck had 6 tubas for the sake of deep irony. However no modern opera stage could sustain 6 tuba players for that one scene (isn’t it in some sort of tavern?).

That opera was an analytic project during my college years. Only based on score and recordings, because it was not on the repertory of our opera house at that time.

When it was staged a few years later I went to see it. Ultimate art and expression, but it was so depressive an experience that I said: Never more!

It belongs to the story, that I have an extended first hand experience with German culture, as I was raised there.

The poems and rhymes presented to German kids at least up to my generation would send editors and teacher into jail in most modern countries.

Even if I was the son of the headmaster on a school for the Danish minority, we all very naturally had to be taught German as a first language by teachers approved by the German government.

The horror presented to German kids still sits in my bones.

A very fine musicologist, member of this board, mailed me about one of my settings of a German folk song. He found the setting very oddly instrumentated and also was puzzled by the ending.

I told him, that this setting, which is available for brass 5-tet and for 10-piece brass, was my very compressed take on German culture: profound love and a deep sense of horror conglomerated. I am no great composer, but I am deeply inspired by Mahler and Webern, who basically express the same sentiments.

American music is very different, but some of the same depth will be found in the original blues and probably also in some of the old style mountain music out of West Virginia. I am no expert on these forms, just a plain listener, and I hear some profound pain expressed there.

Just another rant.

Klaus Smedegaard Bjerre