Posted by Jay Bertolet on December 15, 2000 at 08:25:52:
In Reply to: More orchestral questions... posted by SirC on December 15, 2000 at 01:51:17:
Nobody can answer some of your questions definitively because they aren't you. The answers to some of these questions are part of what defines you as a player. Whether you decide your sound should be more directional or more enveloping in nature is dependant on your tonal concepts. Nobody can make those value judgments for you, that would be like me telling you that you should prefer the color red over the color blue. You have to make those choices.
With regard to dropping the jaw, I have one piece of advice for you. Don't go down that road. Dropping your jaw more than small amounts will affect your tuning, your sound quality, your flexibility, and the centering aspect of your sound. Obviously, there are players who move their jaw and embouchure around quite a bit and they make it work for them. I used to be one of those players. I have come to realize it is more difficult to play this way. And I now strive to move as little as possible. The benefits for me are better intonation, better center to my sound, better flexibility, better projection, and a louder low range. And playing is so much easier to control. It takes time to develop a sound you like while keeping the embouchure consistent but it does come. I encourage you to try.
Don't kid yourself into thinking that the audition committee didn't know you had played the entire excerpt wrong! After hearing a bunch (presumably) of players execute this excerpt, I'd guess they knew for sure what it was supposed to sound like. Or they are incompletely clueless when it comes to tuba playing. Of course it is possible to play the excerpt wrong by missing the first note by a partial. If you did that and continued to play at that pitch level, using the same fingerings as normal, the intervals would come out right. In that range the partials are so close together that it is even easy to do this. This is one of the reasons why the excerpt is on the list! I tell all my students to honk out a couple of notes on a new horn during an audition so that they can get acclimated to the switch. I don't think most committees will begrudge you this. Just don't start playing a concerto to get warmed up.
I think you absolutely play with a different approach in auditions. What does a violinist (who may be on the audition committee) know about really great projection in the Ride? Save your ensemble sound for the ensemble. Remember that the people listening to you at an audition are looking for a player who sounds good. Always sound good. Past that you have to decide whether you want to sound like a soloist or something else at any given moment or situation. There are so many different scorings where you will be required to blend with different groups of instruments that I don't think it is practical to think of always trying to blend with one specific group of instruments. Don't let these kinds of issues affect how you want to sound because you are still holding a tuba in your hands. Always keep in mind what the composer intended and be an ensemble player.
I do think you have a good point about what you should sound like on your F. There are more these days but the vast majority of F tubas don't sound much like a CC tuba. They just have different sounds. They also have a very different feel to that of a CC tuba. If you are sounding like your CC or approaching playing F like you do your CC, there may be a problem. Consult your teacher for better advice than I can give having never heard you play a note. But the caveat I would offer is to use a tuba for its intended purpose and approach playing it in the manner which gets the best qualities it has to offer. Try to avoid playing a tuba in a manner that is contrary to how it was intended and for purposes it is not well suited. Always be aware of the characteristic sound of whatever tuba you are playing.
My opinion for what it's worth...