Excellent point. One of the main characteristics of the true brass band instrumentation is that there are 2 BBb and 2 Eb Tubas. For arrangers and composers alike this distinction opens up numerous possibilities for extra sound colour and textures within the realms of the deep and warm sounds that are possible from the low brass within a brass band. It is pure evolution and cannot be replaced or supplemented by other instruments at other pitches.
Any music writer who ignores this, or does not take the chance to exploit its virtues will be missing a large part of the reason it exists in the first place. Jonathan On 29 Jun 2011, at 19:00, <[email protected]> <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
