A new tuba concerto.

I just finished watching a live stream of what should have been a major world premiere - that of Gunther Schuller's Concerto No. 2 for Tuba and Orchestra. The work was the last major commission of Harvey Phillips, whose importance as a musician and champion of the doofiest of all orchestral instruments cannot be overstated. Phillips was single-handedly responsible for bringing into existence probably about 65% of the music written for solo tuba in various contexts, some of which is actually worth hearing. The man was a giant and a huge inspiration to every tuba player - it's unfortunate that he looked so much like a tuba player. A very nice profile from the early 1980s can be seen below:



Anyway, with all that aside, Phillps' last commission before he died last year was for the work premiered tonight by Mike Roylance with the Boston University Orchestra, conducted by the composer. A preview article in the Boston Globe mentioned some of the background, and quoted Roylance, who is the principal tubist for the Boston Symphony, as saying it was the most difficult piece he ever had to perform.

It sounded difficult to play for sure. I can give nothing but credit to Roylance for his performance tonight of a piece whose technical demands were beyond most musicians' reaches regardless of their instrument. I have given my share of world premieres, too, and it's a tough task no matter what - you don't have the interpretive ideas of previous performers to fall back on, and you have to find the music in the ink that's placed in front of you on top of finding the technique and practicing all the licks. And it's a huge responsibility. If you blow the first performance, the chance of a second or third performance diminishes rapidly.

Well, at least as Roulance and Schuller performed the work, I am sad to say that I wouldn't expect many more performances. It's a stuffy, uninteresting work that takes itself far too seriously, and has little to offer the soloist other than an ingratiating quote of Stravinsky's Petroushka in the first movement (that quote is from a 15 second long tuba solo, one of the most prominent in the orchestral literature, that tuba players start working on in high school and seem never to stop). In all honesty, tuba solos are still kind of a new thing, and they have to serve a function beyond the composer's wishes for a while longer; they have to help audiences get over the prejudices they have about an instrument that's much more flexible, lyrical, and enjoyable to listen to than its reputation implies, and they have to make tuba players want to lobby for further performances. Schuller's concerto is stodgy, muddily orchestrated, and unforgiving, and frankly it's not going to be heard again.

It's really too bad, because serious tuba players have a serious problem. We play an instrument that is every bit as nimble as a trumpet, with a wider range and a lovely, dark color that makes for great solos - but we have to prove it. After years and years of spending more time as salesmen than artists, it's colored the whole tradition of tuba playing. A basic of tenet of tubism, if you will, is that it's more important to prove the worth of the performer than to make music. So now you get fantastic musicians with insane technical abilities and the ability to turn a phrase better than most violinists playing things like this all the time:



Some day I hope that will change. I dream of a day that I no longer play weird music on a tuba - I just play weird music. Until then, the best we have, from a musical and marketing standpoint, is still Ralph Vaughan Williams' Concerto for Bass Tuba and Orchestra, which, lovely as it is, remains the semi-humorous eccentricity of a crotchety old English octogenarian. Still, lovely:

Neil Feather's Strange Inventions

I'm not generally familiar with the subculture of inventors of musical instruments. The tuba is weird enough for me, so I stay focused on that for the most part. But about ten years ago, I played at the High Zero Improvisation Festival in Baltimore, and I met Neil Feather. Nice guy. He has invented and built whole new families of musical instruments and devices that use electic pickups and strings and bicycle wheels and things. They are really quite lovely to look at, and they sound great. It's pretty easy to get lost in his website, http://neilfeather.org . In three clips below, you can see him playing the melocipede (a strange electric instrument that's a cross between an exercise bike, a music box and passing traffic), the nondo (sheet metal, piano wire, and some sticks to beat on it with), and one of his suspended string instruments (which show the influence of Keith Rowe). Fun stuff.

In Memoriam: Milton Babbitt and John Barry

Two big losses in the music world happened over the weekend, and I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention them here.

Composer Milton Babbitt died on Saturday at the age of 94. Babbitt was a giant in the American avant-garde - a total serialist who arranged the parameters of musical sound (pitch, rhythm, envelope, timbre, anything he could control as a composer) into complex systems to such a sophisticated degree that he just about ended the possibilities of composing as a total serialist. And at the same time, he helped start the next big thing, helping to develop the first electronic music synthesizer with RCA, founding the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and fueling one of the few genuine revolutions in music.

Babbitt wrote an article for High Fidelity in 1958 which explained his strong belief that music should be researched and studied in the Academy the same way science and mathematics are (read it here), which the editors cheekily entitled "Who Cares If You Listen?" It's a fascinating read -- without the title, it's an interesting argument for allowing musicians to work with sound as experimentalists in a safe space, but it became known as a primary document in the establishment of ivory tower elitism in the United States.

He wasn't entirely opposed to populist music, as much as his reputation indicates the contrary, though. Among his students, the most recognizable name outside of the New Music world was Stephen Sondheim, who really put self-indulgent musical theater on the map. And Babbitt flirted with Gunther Schuller's Third Stream concepts a bit, as well. While a lot of his music strikes me as elegant if somewhat uninteresting, I've always had a thing for his 1957 composition "All Set" for jazz ensemble. There's something genuinely swinging about the aggressive lack of swing. I've heard performances of the piece that bring out the "jazz" in it better than what I link to here, but the sound quality is good, and the commentary on the screen is another nice read:



Yesterday, composer John Barry died at 77 of a heart attack. The celebrated film composer is best known for the soundtracks of 11 James Bond films, but in poking around today for something different to post, I realized just how ubiquitous his music was in the second half of the 20th Century. I can think of no one whose orchestration sounds like his, and I can only come up with a handful of composers for western orchestra who can be as easily identified by tone color alone (Messiaen for sure, maybe Xenakis and Holst). He was another electronic music pioneer of sorts, adding some very early synthesizer parts to his scores in the 1960s and 1970s.

Here's a classic Barry recording that isn't from a Bond film - the theme to the 1970s TV drama The Persuaders: