Posted by Rick Denney on January 11, 2001 at 19:23:51:
After sending off my check, my copy of Clifford Bevan's updated edition of The Tuba Family finally arrived with a British postmark.
A Quick Review:
It's a good read. I have the first edition, and there are many parts that remain, including his willingness to flavor the narrative with his own view, though he does this in an open and transparent way. He has removed one of the first edition's weak elements, the music list, deferring to the much-better Tuba Sourcebook. In its place he has added greatly extended discussions of the tuba scene in Great Britain, including a few well-aimed potshots at B&H. His discussion of the English F tuba is fantastic, and makes me want to own one. Badly.
He has a picture of a Boosey "cavalry" tuba, in F, dating from the 1890's, which could be a Yamaha 621 F if you back up about 50 feet. Same size, same front-action pistons, and so on. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
He also included an interesting explanation of why English orchestral tubists made the switch from Barlow F tubas to EEb compensators.
One complaint--in all his new stuff in the chapter Instruments and Music: Great Britain, he mentioned Vaughan Williams by name only once, and listed no example of his music. Many of RVW's symponies have spectacular tuba parts, and are far more extensive and likely to be heard than most of the examples he did include.
He has a new chapter on the cimbasso, and his expanded chapter on the serpent is fun to read and more comprehensive than any I've seen.
His discussion of the American-style orchestral tuba is a great improvement over the previous edition, but not likely to be new to U.S. readers who have followed the latest trends in York copies. Stauffer's discussion of American instruments in the 20th century is more comprehensive (up until the 80's).
He mentions many significant builders, but then leaves out others that are equally significant. For example, he included no discussion at all of Boehm and Meinl, or Rudolf Meinl, and how they related to Wenzel Meinl (aka Meinl-Weston). That's a frequently heard question among acolytes.
He also included a list of tubas that appeared (with their owners) at the Dalls Symphony audition in 1995 that was most illuminating. This he took from the TUBA Journal, and he has quoted from the journal in many places.
There are detail flaws here and there, such as his statement that Jacobs sold one of the Yorks to the CSO and the other one to Pokorny. I suspect such mistakes are unavoidable.
He includes a chart that identifies the trends in low-brass instrumentation in the orchestras of various countries.
He needed a chapter titled: Instruments and Music: Japan. He did describe the construction of a good EEb compensator by Yamaha, but said nothing of the many varied instruments of that maker.
Overall, he's added a bunch of new pictures, and placed them close to their related text rather than in a section of "plates" in the middle of the book. The book itself is well printed on coated stock, in clear type, perfect bound, with what the book industry would call a "trade paper" cover. It's not the hard binding of the first edition, but it's also not Scribners.
For those of you who don't have the first edition, the new edition makes a worthwhile replacement, and will provide a valuable reference in narrative form to go along with non-narrative Tuba Sourcebook. It's worth the 60 bucks, and every student of the instrument's history should have it.
If you have the first edition, then the second edition provides enough additional information to make it a valuable addition.
Rick "making room on my bookshelf" Denney