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My community band is playing the Bacchanale from Camille Saint-Saëns opera Samson and Delilah. It is a great tuba part. Would this have been originally written for the French C tuba? Would there have been more than one tuba?

The range goes all the way to A above the staff which you don't see often in community band music. It is a divided part, but I'm assuming that is to accomodate the range of most concert band players. I don't have a problem covering it on a bass or contrabass, but am leaning toward using a small F tuba to get a sound closer to what might have been originally used. Anybody have any knowledge on this?

I have played this with orchestra. There is only one tuba part which is not over demanding (nothing particularly high). Quite often band parts cover the double bass part in orchestra, so are quite different.

It would no doubt have been written for French C tuba, but the orchestral part works well on CC contrabass tuba

Neptune wrote:I have played this with orchestra. There is only one tuba part which is not over demanding (nothing particularly high). Quite often band parts cover the double bass part in orchestra, so are quite different.

It would no doubt have been written for French C tuba, but the orchestral part works well on CC contrabass tuba

Yes, the orchestra part does work well on a contrabass. This work can get raucous (Bacchanale - I wonder why?), so the bigger sound is better.

To the OP: This work was orginally written for orchestra. It's going to be kind of hard to conform to the composer's notion of the sound by playing a band arrangement.

tofu wrote:The range goes all the way to A above the staff which you don't see often in community band music. It is a divided part, but I'm assuming that is to accomodate the range of most concert band players. I don't have a problem covering it on a bass or contrabass, but am leaning toward using a small F tuba to get a sound closer to what might have been originally used. Anybody have any knowledge on this?

A above the staff? The second space treble clef A? How does this accomodate the "range of most concert band players"?

Play it on a tuba (CC or BBb will do just fine).

Semi-unrelated, but...

There is a spot in this opera where two ophecleides play in octaves doubling the baritone voice. For that, we use two tubas (F on top, CC on bottom). This spot is near the beginning of the opera, so Mr. Johns gets to go home after we play...

The OP says something about band, in which case, whatever was used in the orchestral version is moot. But that was scored with a pair of ophicleides as earlier mentioned.

I just performed it a little bit ago with. Used Ophicleide. Works great. I'd be hard-pressed to use anything bigger than euph... it's like bringing a bass clarinet to play the 2nd clarinet part. It might "work", but...?

J.c.S.

I played the band arrangement last season in a 90-100 piece summer band...it got just a bit loud to say the least. I'd bring something that you can get plenty of power and clarity with.