The original question was about the writing for a specific band in Nova Scotia.
I am living in Denmark having a lot of contacts within the American tuba and horn communities. I have had some experiences with my settings being used in US brass bands. So the following is not about the original very specific band. For a friend on the west coast I had made a brass quintet setting of an old (1875) American solo for tuba with the then common mix of brasses and a few woodwinds. I often provide F as well as Eb parts for the horn(-s). Suddenly I hear from a brass band in Indiana, that they had played my setting of that solo. And as I hadn’t then made a setting for brass band, they had played from the quintet setting with parts doubled or even tripled or quadrupled. Bound to sound odd. I then made the brass band version with parts in the standard brass band notation and supplemented with the trombone and tuba parts in bass clef concert notation. Baritone and euphonium players usually have been through the trumpet version of Arban, so they know Bb treble clef (written a ninth above the actual sounding pitch), but American bands often use ringers on trombones and tubas, and these ringers often are limited to reading bass clef. Especially with the Eb tuba parts that causes problems. The Eb tuba is the bass tuba of the brass band. That part used to be played on fairly small tubas with 15" bells (until around 1980), which fitted well with their often being playing in octaves with the the BBb contrabass tubas. If the Eb tuba part is being overpowered by being played on too large instruments, the bass line often will sound too rumbling. I know, as I often took my own large Eb tuba an octave down from the written part for that very reason. And left the top octave to the player with the smaller instrument. American tuba ringers often bring their main instrument, which usually is a fairly big CC or BBb tuba. As they cannot read from the treble clef BBb part, they apply a well known reading trick, which is to read from the Eb tuba part and just mentally change the key signature and substitute the treble clef with the bass clef. The result being a row of huge tubas playing the bass tuba line, while the contrabass tuba line is more or less neglected. Bad from any point of view. And with more modern scoring, where the tuba lines often are more detailed, leading to gross misrepresentations of the scores. Hence my suggestion about providing alternative bass clef concert parts. Finale has pre-made transpositions for all brass band relevant instruments but for the BBb tuba. Yet that one is easily made by choosing the Bb tenor transposition and changing the 8 right below the drop down menu to 15. Klaus >________________________________ >From: John Howell <[email protected]> > >Only one bit of general advice: accept any limitations they suggest >to you, because they may very well be traditional and expected. And >of course be prepared to provide parts in transposed treble clef for >all instruments except bass trombone, unless asked to do otherwise. >(Some brass bands will definitely be more traditional than others, or >might actually want something that isn't quite as traditional.) > >John > > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
