back to Bach

[bloke]

For home practice, I continue to circle back to Bach cello suite movements...

They challenge my age, the operation - by an old man - of this huge BB-flat tuba, the required brisk movement of these large rotary valves, and all that jazz...sure: in addition to constantly reminding me that I'm SUPPOSED to be making MUSIC.

Check out this really superb cellist (particularly playing the FIRST of the pair of Gavottes - the one in duple meter).

One thing I need to do is to lose the caffeine , and play at HIS tempo (which makes a helluva lot more sense - in the mid-50's bpm - rather than up in the mid-60's...even though I tend to think of gavottes at-or-near the faster previously-mentioned tempo range).

The OTHER thing that I need to do (...how many of you are old guitar players, and learn tuba music the same way?) is to learn all the CHORDS to first Gavotte - as they pass so very quickly (mostly: a new chord for every half beat - ie. pair of eighth notes).

I like it. I don't yet 100% understand it (harmonically...LOTS of implied 7th chords)...and I'm going to pull out my (actual) cello edition (setting this trombone book aside), cheat, and just LOOK at the chords that BACH wrote (double and triple stops). I'm going to quit playing "at it", and stop on each half beat (pair of 8th notes) figure out the chords, run each chord's arpeggio (maybe even WRITE IN the changes), and then go back and work on this dance movement based on an actual understanding of it.

The second gavotte (triple meter) is much easier. The "notes" are faster, but the CHORDS move MUCH more slowly and are much more obvious - even though there are very few double/triple stops.

As should seem obvious, I'm hitting movements which I previously (over the last fifty-something years of playing) tended to skip past.

[russiantuba]

I have debated for years about the appropriate tuba to play these on, 8vb on the contrabass, or use the Sauer edition (transposed) on bass, where it fits perfectly.

There are rewards to both options as well as challenges to work past. I am still debating this before printing off a set to explore.

(Possible edits to this post after Saturday after 4pm...it is a bit challenging to go an entire week without typing an entire letter... )

[bloke]

I'm not sure if it's really appropriate to play these in front of other people, no matter how well they are mastered. I might put four or five movements together for a special recital if (??) I thought people were really interested in hearing how the big tuba - that they see on stage all the time - actually sounds and what it can do.

[martyneilan]

Doug Yeo has editions of some of the cello suites for bass trombone that lay well on F tuba.
https://www.yeodoug.com/resources/faq/f ... uites.html
Roger Bobo put out a book for Bach on tuba that works well on bass or contrabass tuba from what I can remember.
https://www.grothmusic.com/p-129196-bac ... anied.aspx
I have played bits and pieces out of these but would NOT want to do an entire recital of only this.
A couple of years ago during the covid lockdown, Yo-Yo Ma played through all the cello suites back-to-back live on public radio for about two and a half hours. I caught the last half hour and you could tell he was exhausted at the end.

[peterbas]

.

[bloke]

Much less romantic, likely much more authentic, and not just the pitch level. Percussive playing like that lends itself much more to dancing. I tend to believe that every era at its own versions of "rock".

I'm glad someone isn't just another Casals knockoff.

[donn]

Having a listen to that video, the cut that jumps out at me is V courante at 40:32.

For folks who have any doubts about the pronunciation dogma - you're right, that gargle is pretty much BS. It's true that in German, that CH is pronounced somewhat like that, but it's just a sound like our F and TH - it isn't labored over like that. It's good to know how foreign proper names would sound and adjust your pronunciation in that direction, but it's silly to make a production out of it.

[bloke]

I view it as instructive and important to consider how baroque era music was originally interpreted and performed. As a 21st century working musician, I don't see much harm in using it as etudes at home and interpreting it in casals-ish ways to aid myself in interpreting most music encountered.
Something that's probably not of much use would be to not interpret it at all, and just play the notes.

[Casca Grossa]

I have debated for years about the appropriate tuba to play these on, 8vb on the contrabass, or use the Sauer edition (transposed) on bass, where it fits perfectly.

There are rewards to both options as well as challenges to work past. I am still debating this before printing off a set to explore.

(Possible edits to this post after Saturday after 4pm...it is a bit challenging to go an entire week without typing an entire letter... )

Andrew Miller had a nice recording of the Sauer version posted on YouTube. Not sure if it is back up. I believe he played that on a 6/4 Nirschl.

[russiantuba]

Recently, I had a tuba student who I assigned a few of these for to study who ended up doing them on a recital, as it was his choice and desire (I tried to talk him out of it). I also just had a bass trombonist do the Saraband from the Cello Suite No. 5 on his recital, which I feel is doable and is often asked on bass trombone auditions.

I think these are great study pieces to work on getting a phrase shape and not playing notes, but even on cello, I am not convinced they are great recital pieces.

With that being said, during my DMA, the "Wind Symphony" performed an arrangement of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and if I recall correctly, one of the DMA conducting students was on the podium. We had the famed organist Michael Murray on our library faculty, and they asked him how we would interpret it (since he has played it on a multitude of organs around the world). He said basically as @bloke mentioned, just play it as written, don't do much with it, and let the music take care of itself.

With that being said, as a tubist, Bach is hard to teach. It reminds me of my counterpoint class--you have to make music and you are boxed in. This type of scoring (and playing) long term taught me a lot about aiming for peaks of phrase and keeping the direction going while using a metronome.

I still stand by my original statement about Bach being great study exercises, like an etude, to develop musical skills.

[donn]

I think I read somewhere that they were written for that purpose, as exercises for perhaps a specific student.

I don't know, it doesn't matter to me how he got there. I don't know about the kind of sentimental analysis that the experts were spouting in that video -- this one's full of grief and pain, some kind of seventh interval is about life being a bummer. Whatever. Music is not a real language, it isn't an information encoding. I don't pretend to know what Bach was feeling like when he wrote that stuff, and I have to assume he would have a strong urge to beat me with a stick if he heard me playing it. But he's long gone, and these pieces are going to be around as long as we have musical instruments, because they're terrifically good music.

Play some Telemann if you want to see what I'm talking about. I don't really mean to knock Telemann, he was a fine composer and what I've played out of his vast output has been good stuff - in some musical sense, maybe he could have done a better job on some of those suite pieces. But it is what it is, and there's a dimension that Bach put in there, if only in some places, that I don't think you'll find in Telemann so much. That dimension isn't "pain" or some fool thing like that, it's a structure that the performer can put his or her own weight on, and bring something otherwise inexpressible to the performance. Listen to Wisperwey do those things, and say they aren't recital pieces?

I have to add, somewhat against my better judgement, that the tuba recording mentioned above is indeed still on youtube, and to my ears an example of that "let the music take care of itself" approach ... as much of it as I listened to, which wasn't much. No music takes care of itself. I'm not saying that's really what that player was up to, it just didn't register much for me, but if he'd been letting the music take care of itself, that sure could explain why.

[MikeS]

Andrew Miller had a nice recording of the Sauer version posted on YouTube. Not sure if it is back up. I believe he played that on a 6/4 Nirschl.

Sure, but could he play it sitting in a tree (starting around 2:20)? I am actually posting this because of how much I enjoy listening to Ophelie Gaillard. Trust me, this is five minutes of your life well spent.

[bloke]

Regardless of how nicely a tuba player plays a transcription, I prefer to listen to an artist-level player play a piece (which I'm attempting to play on a tuba) on the originally-intended instrument.

bloke "not a snob...but also prefer to study history from original documents and writings of the day, rather than from textbooks"

[bloke]

I have debated for years about the appropriate tuba to play these on, 8vb on the contrabass, or use the Sauer edition (transposed) on bass, where it fits perfectly.

There are rewards to both options as well as challenges to work past. I am still debating this before printing off a set to explore.

(Possible edits to this post after Saturday after 4pm...it is a bit challenging to go an entire week without typing an entire letter... )

At the risk of over-representing my playing ability, I don't really spend time playing much of anything on F tuba, because most things are easy for me on F tuba. I spend the overwhelming majority of my time with the big contrabass. I pick up the F tuba and brush up on it a little bit when I need it or view it as the most appropriate instrument for an upcoming job. This is really sort of sad, because it's my best instrument and my favorite instrument. It's the one instrument which I would never consider selling and which I've owned for over four decades - constantly checking out new models to see if there's anything better and having never found anything as good.

[russiantuba]

Regardless of how nicely a tuba player plays a transcription, I prefer to listen to an artist-level player play a piece (which I'm attempting to play on a tuba) on the originally-intended instrument.

bloke "not a snob...but also prefer to study history from original documents and writings of the day, rather than from textbooks"

I encourage students to NOT listen to pieces that they are playing (but listen to a lot of music), with the exception of transcriptions and period pieces.

I tell them they aren't allowed to listen to tubists attempt to play them. A couple years back I had a very talented college student play a Baroque piece, and his interpretation was "meh", wasn't special. I asked which artist he listened to, and he listed a really amazing tubist.

I then told him "no tubists" but listen to the original instrument, and he came back next week with a much better interpretation, great musicality, and style.

[bloke]

LOL...
I tend to suspect that strings and the other orchestral winds are taught a lot more about music than we tend to be taught. A lot of what we taught are ways to manage to play things reasonably well on these giant unwieldy things, and we rarely seem to get around to talking too much about phrasing and such.
... and I don't need to hear about the exceptions. I understand and know that the exceptions to this are legion.

[arpthark]

I encourage students to NOT listen to pieces that they are playing

Can you expand on your philosophy behind this a bit? This is essentially the opposite to the approach I was taught in music school.

[bloke]

I wonder if this means that he discourages them from listening to people playing transcriptions of other instruments' pieces played on the tuba? The rest of his comments seem to hint at that.

Personally, I avoid listening to tuba transcriptions of pieces that I'm personally working on at home, and look towards recordings of the top tier players of the actual instruments for which pieces were written.

eh...??

[russiantuba]

I encourage students to NOT listen to pieces that they are playing

Can you expand on your philosophy behind this a bit? This is essentially the opposite to the approach I was taught in music school.

Sure thing, and people have called me crazy for this and what other names, but here we go.

The first time I heard this was from an orchestral conductor which I ignored, but my DMA professor brought it up and I agreed with him. So many people don’t come up with their own musical ideas, they copy what others do and have no original creativity in formulating their own ideas instead of just copying what XYZ tubist or euphoniumst has done well or not. I guess I should say this was instilled in me during 8th grade from my first private teacher @Mark who refused to record the TMEA all state etudes to prevent “monkey see monkey do”, and I thank him for this date as the self discovery is what help make me as a performer.

All the answers on “how it sounds” is on the page, using a metronome and drone, or plugging it into your favorite finale replacement program.

I give normally 3 listens of a piece in lessons on various recordings if there is something odd, where I will allow how they do a section and how I would do it. I love finding recordings that do it totally different than one another and make them decide and formulate what they like.

I’ll want each student to have a unique approach that interest that does what the music says. Transcriptions are my exception to this rule.

With that being said, I assign weekly listening assignments where students must write reports on. I highly encourage a TON of listening. Good musical ideas and concepts will be conveyed in the subconscious level and allow student musicians to see what works for them, allowing their own voice influenced from a wide variety of styles and repertoire.

[russiantuba]

I wonder if this means that he discourages them from listening to people playing transcriptions of other instruments' pieces played on the tuba? The rest of his comments seem to hint at that.

Personally, I avoid listening to tuba transcriptions of pieces that I'm personally working on at home, and look towards recordings of the top tier players of the actual instruments for which pieces were written.

eh...??

That is my exact philosophy with transcriptions. I posted my tuba music one above l.