Playing String Bass part to Beethoven 9 on Tuba

[Scott Roeder]

I don't know why but I got called to play this on a concert in a couple of weeks. I got the music tonight at my first rehearsal. It is totally insane but the conductor loves the tuba sound on it and the pay is good.

Has anyone out there tried to do this before? Do you have any observations about the experience? Also (this is a shot in the dark), has anyone redone the part to make it more tuba friendly and would you be willing to send the part to me. I think by changing some of the octaves leaps and playing some of it an octave higher than the String Bass that it could be managed a little more easily. I think survival is going to be the goal for this concert.

Thanks for your help.

Scott Roeder
tubapt6@yahoo.com

[Chuck(G)]

If you can get your hands on the Mahler orchestration of the 9th, it might give you some hints, as he added a tuba part.

Are you just doubling existing basses or will you be covering the bass part by your lonesome (oof!)?

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Another thoughtt is that if you do a "seat of the pants" doubling of the basses, there's bound to be some critic out there who doesn't like it and will blame both you and your conductor when the review's penned. If you stick with Mahler, he can say only that he didn't like what Mahler did--and you're both off the hook.

[Z-Tuba Dude]

Work on your "pizzicato" sound.

The cellos and basses are in octaves throughout, so if you choose to play anything up the octave (as written), it would be doubling the cellos, but I personally would not recommend that approach. If the passage doesn't lie well for the tuba, I would just leave it out.

[KarlMarx]

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....Has anyone out there tried to do this before? Do you have any observations about the experience? Also (this is a shot in the dark), has anyone redone the part to make it more tuba friendly and would you be willing to send the part to me. I think by changing some of the octaves leaps and playing some of it an octave higher than the String Bass that it could be managed a little more easily. I think survival is going to be the goal for this concert.

We don't know whether Beethoven would have employed the tuba in this work, if it had been available to him. But we know, that old Ludwig was pretty well aware about what he did. He was a frontrunner, when he employed trombones and piccolo in his 5th. And his usage of the horn in the slow movement of the 9th is pretty advanced for his days.

I don't have my score at hand, but I seem to remember, that LvB used a by then unique tuning of the kettledrums: an octave on the tonica D. Not the usual fourth or fifth between tonica and dominant. This goes at least for the first movement in D minor (I have a pretty good memory of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th movements, whereas the 2nd escapes me).

This timpani tuning emphasises the drama LvB created out of an interval, which we today consider pretty lame: the octave!

It may be discussed, whether it is a musical crime to let the tuba double the string basses in this cornerstone of the history of music. But if you change the octave leaps, you are bound for the musical death row without a trial and with no appeals possible.

Why would you want to play some of the part an octave above the string basses? You would defy the whole purpose of your employment for this unusual task! Any decent contrabass tuba/tubist can bottom out a string bass, and I don't recall LvB taking his string basses up in a range, where you would need a bass tuba.

Hopefully you are not hinting towards a reading problem. I never understood the tubists, who couldn't juggle octaves. I know about the nature of their problem: for them any given note is a sign indicating which buttons to press or un-press. That’s not what notes are about. They are indications of sounds defined pitchwise and timewise. A skilled musician will know how to handle these, even if the notation isn’t the standard one for him/her, octavewise that is. Aging eyes like my own ones hate stacks of ledger lines, so whenever the string bass and the tuba parts are identical in band arrangements, I prefer to play from the string bass part applying bass trombone cum euphonium “fingeringsâ€

[Kevin Hendrick]

... we shouldn’t forget, that LvB wrote one of the best tuba excerpts ever written. Only he misplaced it in the string bass part of the 2nd movement of his 5th.

I know the one you mean -- it's been one of my favorites since I first played it (almost 30 years ago)! Definitely not easy, but worth the effort.

[Doug@GT]

... we shouldn’t forget, that LvB wrote one of the best tuba excerpts ever written. Only he misplaced it in the string bass part of the 2nd movement of his 5th.

I know the one you mean -- it's been one of my favorites since I first played it (almost 30 years ago)! Definitely not easy, but worth the effort.

Ya'll are being facetious, right?

Doug "who just listened to the 5th and is a little confused"

[Kevin Hendrick]

Ya'll are being facetious, right?

Doug "who just listened to the 5th and is a little confused"

Sorry about the confusion, Doug -- it's been a couple of years since I last played it. The part I was referring to (and I think the one Karl was talking about as well) is in the third movement, down low, fast and doubled in the celli. It took a lot of woodshedding to get it ready to perform, but it's worth the work -- good practice in double-tonguing below the staff, and a good workout for the fingers, too! (and ya gotta love the expressions on the bassists' faces when they realise you can actually play it )

[KarlMarx]

The staccato of the 3rd movement of the LvB 5th is interesting. But not nearly as interesting as the fast legato passages of the 2nd movement.

There have been theories about LvB’s bad hearing being the rationale behind these fairly virtuoso basses-only passages, which all too often are drowned out by a far too loud accompaniment in modern orchestras.

But LvB was in full command of his musical senses. He wrote for Viennese orchestras, where the woods and brasses were much softer than in modern orchestras.

Old drawings furthermore tell that the distribution between cellos and basses was different back then as compared to modern orchestras, where these two strings are separated in two distinct sections.

Back in the LvB days cellos and basses formed one mutual section with one cello and one bass sharing a stand.

There are lots of elements into the balance equation of then and now. Gut strings versus steel dittos just being one of them.

Anyway the double bass part of LvB's 5th should be an interesting experience for tubists being able to read "octave down".

Being 6 feet under with eyes full of dirt I should be happy about being second-guessed.

Ain't!

Carolus Marximus Prettywellawaricus

[Mark E. Chachich]

cellobasso is absolutly correct on all points! Also, sit with the bass section, you are not a brass player (at least in function). Match the bass sound and octave (as stated by cellobasso) and listen. Most tubists that I have run into over the years are inflexable and want to play like tuba player "fill in the blank" instead of what is required for the section or the music.

I have played string bass in ochestras about as much as I have played the tuba in orchestras. I have also played tuba as a part of a bass section or as the bass in shows. Enjoy the experience!

Mark