My reply:Dear Mr. H
I have a few questions, okay so when I play the all-state piece with all of the high notes, sometimes my teeth hurt after playing it. I think it is because of the high notes, but is there anything I can do to prevent this? Also I want to seriously think about going to Julliard as an option for college, and I don't know how the auditions work but, is it possible to maybe pick a very challenging piece now and perfect it for the future? What do you think of this idea? What is a good piece to pick? Do you think that I actually have to potential to get into Julliard?
If high notes make your teeth hurt I suspect that it may be due to pressing too hard on your mouthpiece. Don't do that. Trying too hard to play too high when you are too young can lead to pain and bad habits. I try to get my students to learn the scale patterns and the "root-3-5-7 pattern" in all the keys to develop the high chops carefully, making only brief excursions into the high register. (Eventually you will start doing a "root-3-5-7-9" pattern in all keys.) I also advise my students to practice the high parts down an octave frequently, and up as written only occasionally.
In recent years tuba playing has become much more competitive than it was when I was your age. It has been pointed out that today your chance of winning a position in a professional symphony orchestra is comparable to your chance of winning a seat in the U.S. senate or a spot on a pro basketball team. As a result, the tubists who do make it tend to be so focused on the job that they often burn out early. A condition called "focal dystonia" has destroyed the careers of a lot of tubists who are younger than I am. Go to Google and read about it.
In my opinion, making music is the greatest form of recreation ever invented. If you are capable of earning a living with any other activity you can enjoy making music as recreation for your entire adult life, and you can also pick up a little extra money with it. But most people who try to depend entirely on music for a living end up hating it. I can tell you about professional musicians younger than I am who ended up driving school buses, clerking in record stores, and managing restaurants.
I don't know anything about Julliard, but I think it is a specialty school for people who don't just want to play, but rather for those who have to play because they can't do anything else. Are you one of those poor souls, or are you one of the fortunate people who have potential in other areas besides music? If you are one of the latter group then I would urge you to consider colleges with good instrumental music programs but also good departments of science, mathematics,engineering, languages, business, etc. etc.
You asked about picking a very challenging piece to prepare for the future as a possible audition piece for Julliard. There are plenty of absurdly challenging pieces out there now, and most of them are in the extreme high register a lot of the time. You can easily bust your chops hacking on that kind of stuff. I would urge you instead to work on perfecting the entire Bordogni book, making it sound like music. Also master the Kopprasch and Blazhevich books, and the Effective Etudes for Jazz by Carubia and Jarvis, down an octave.
Buy a lot of solo tuba CDs by big-name soloists and listening to what they do. Also listen to every other kind of music that you can find, and think about how you might adapt it for the tuba. You may find something that you really like, that nobody else has done. Prepare that, and also do your math and science homework.
-Mr. H.-
