Tuba Quartet Wedding Music

[dmooretu]

I'm getting married this summer. Euphonium and euphonium music has always been a huge part of my life and I've played in multiple quartets while in grad school. We are looking to hire a quartet to play at our wedding and I need to provide some music that I would like played. Does anyone have any suggestions for good music to be played at a wedding for tuba quartet? It could be traditional or something fun. We're just looking for suggestions.

[Alex C]

I've done two weddings with the Dallas Wind Symphony Tuba Quartet. In neither case did the couple request music for quartet and organ, thankfully. I remember being part of the reception music at one of those weddings.

We used Wagner's Bridal Chorus, Mendelsohn's Wedding March, Handel's Hornpipe, Purcell's (Clarke's?) Trumpet Tune and Air and the Marceau Rondo for the service.

If you want stock music, I suggest you buy readily available brass quartet arrangements and have the euphoniums read the trumpet parts and the tubas read trombone parts. Everything should be down an octave. It gets a little wonky playing down an octave because the original scoring doesn't always make beautiful music in a lower octave. To make things work for tuba quartet, often the best choice is to change the key to avoid muddiness. If you want music arranged specifically for euph/tuba quartet, I have those pieces and others.

Has anyone played more than two weddings with a tuba quartet?

[Bill Troiano]

I played 3 weddings with a T/E quartet that I remember. There are arrangements of the traditional wedding rep. arranged for T/E quartet, but I don't have them and can't remember the actual arrangements. However, there is an arr. of Jesu where tuba 1 sits pretty high most of the time. We played this arr. for a wedding around 15 years ago for a Dec. evening wedding on LI where it was very cold, snowing and the church didn't seem to have heat. I played tuba 1 on CC. We were signaled to begin Jesu for the bridesmaids and had planned to play it once with options we created for repeats and cuts depending upon how long it took the bridesmaids to get to the front of the church. Wellllll, we played through it 3 times before any bridesmaids appeared and ended up playing it 4.5 times through. By the 3rd time, most of us were leaving out measures just to rest our chops. After we played that and something for the bride, I leaned over to the quartet, and in a stern, hard whisper, I said, " we will never, ever, EVER PLAY JESU AGAIN !!"

You might want to check solidbrassmusic.com for some T/E arrangements.