Posted by Klaus on October 01, 2001 at 18:58:25:
In Reply to: Eb tuba for a brass band posted by Mary Ann on October 01, 2001 at 16:10:39:
This posting is a terribly long one:
I am strongly biased in my views on the British style brass band as a vehicle for music making.
A lot of my experiences in active playing come from the brass band world. I would never have been playing an ever so small in-the-band-solo on my baritone in the Royal Albert Hall of London back in 1978, had I not been a member of a top rate competitive brass band. The best conductors I have played under were those met in the brass band world (but those maestros all were characterised by being high level pros in the field of legit classical music. Pianists, organists, and yes: conductors).
And then I am basically brought in a very nauseous situation when listening to brass band music. Aside from the top British bands, who have benefitted from their more or less experimental and close co-operation with top rate conductors like Geoffrey Brand, Howard Schnell (?), Elgar Howarth (?), and the recent conductor of Black Dyke (name sadly forgotten) I can not stand the sound and the phrasing. Which tend to represent a set of cliches, that through the habit by brass band players of listening to brass band recordings is trickling down through the ranks and levels of brass banding.
By the way the British conductors mentioned all have started out as top notch symphonic solo trumpeters in the very best opera, symphony, and radio orchestras of London (Geoffrey Brand carrying on some of the Furtwangler tradition out of his personal experiences. I have played under Geoff and have had intense music talks with him a quarter of a century ago. What a man. What a conductor). Maybe worth a thought. No horn players, no trombonists (Denis Wick has not worked much in the brass band field, even if he actually is a good conductor), no tuba players. I also have found it remarkable, that what the Philip Jones brass ensembles represented was about music. And therefore was absolutely incommensurable with the very brass band idea. And had no resemblance whatsoever to the brass band mainstream as a sound medium.
Before I end this rambling, which either qualifies or disqualifies my opinions to be outed on the original thread/question, I will mention some aspects of nationality, that are relevant to the considerations above.
After all I am grateful for the invention of the British brass band style. And I will, at least almost, hide the fact, that French and Belgian names like Sax, Distin, and Besson are among the crucial founding fathers of that style.
But what Dutch and Helvetian editions have spewed on the market of brass band music through the most recent decades, can only be called criminal, if one adheres to strictly musical and estethical standards.
And now to the choice of conical bass brasses for brass band playing.
The choice by default is Sovereign by Besson made and sold by Boosey & Hawkes.
There are very good reasons for that. Brass bands call for agility. Sovereigns are agile. Some of them paying the price by being ligthweights, when it comes to sound, not opening up enough to allow for a professional spanwith in fulness and dynamics. I do not like Sovereign, when it comes to euphs and BBb basses. My personal choices being Yamaha and York/Conn respectively.
But then the original question is about Eb basses in brass bands. The very band part has its problems in the band texture. In original British brass band music the part has the most beautiful tutti and solo lines. Because the composers knew exactly, what they were doing.
In some arrangements I have met Eb parts, that I am less convinced of. The main problem being the bass lines originally carried by cellos/bassoons in octaves to double basses, contra bassoons, and even 2nd bassoons, all of those latters being represented by the BBb basses in the brass band versions. I do not like octaves between BBb and Eb basses, when they take the Eb basses up in the mid and upper ranges. Octaves between BBb basses and euphs represent just so much clarity and matching of overtone spectres when it comes to octaves. But the euph being one of the principal band soloists often is allocated to other tasks, so that the upper octave line is written in the Eb part. Giving the brass band its rumbling bass quality. My personal remedy: to take the Eb part down in the BBb range. Never got a complaint, except for one certain type to which I will come back.
I have not had the chance to try out Willson and Courtois Eb basses. The Yamaha Maestro is marketed to have a fast response due to thin walled inner tubing. In my ears making it a cissy instrument starting to rattle, when I go past some dynamic between mf and f.
The Sovereign 982 is marketed as a parade instrument. I have to concur with that opinion of the maker. I simply find that instrument too much of a brute.
The Sovereign 983 very well could be the instrument to overcome my reservations about the Eb parts mentioned above. But as I am a wide airstream/low pressure player the great qualities and the beauties of the 983 were not sufficient to make our hearts sound on the same wavelength.
It must have been the combined effects of the slower progression of the leadpipe bore and of the narrower bell of the 983. It most certainly can not have been the bore.
Because the instrument that made my heart sing with joy was the Sovereign 981. Almost playing with the ease of my YEP 641. The 5th partial and its derivatives calling for some attention about intonation, but rarely for alternate fingerings. And where the YEP641 needs a main tuning slide trigger to play the two chromatic steps above the open fundamental, the 981 plays these notes amazingly in tune, even if that should not be possible at all from a math point of view. It can be taken to extremes in speed and agility. In my case especially in legato.
Jay Bertolet in a recent posting described the feel of playing the BAT. What he wrote was like taken directly out of my heart. I could have put no better words to the feel, that I have when playing my 981 and my US style BBb's on my often cited PT-50 with its opened up backbore and its 100 grammes bronze-machine-nut-booster-cum-weight-mounted-with-a-garden-hose-washer/damper/fitting .
But one disclaimer has to be delivered: the 981 is a bass tuba, not a contrabass ditto. No matter how low it can be taken with great ease, it still is a .689" instrument, whith its inherent limits of dynamic expansion in parts of the extreme low register. (Limits amazingly bypassed by UK orchestral tubists).
Yet the complaint, which I promised to come back to, came from the bandsman playing a Cerveny 4/4 rotating (isn't that gyrating?) BBb. He most certainly went rotten, when my 981 outsounded him in the range, that he considered his monopoly.
Please forgive me for my expanded longitudinal excursions where the main direction of my posting by the default of board statistics should have been latitudinal. But at least I hardly can be accused for hiding the foundations for my thinking.
Klaus