Posted by Josh Calkin on January 03, 2003 at 10:50:08:
In Reply to: Re: oddly enough....beethoven posted by Steve C on January 02, 2003 at 20:29:26:
I've been asked a few times to play on pieces that have no tuba part in our university orchestra. For our Holiday Concert we did Vaughan Williams' Benedicite for choir and orchestra. My director said that since there was no tuba part, I ought to play the bass 'bone part down an octave. I said "look, if you think I'm mad because there's no part, I'm not, I don't NEED to play", and he told me to try it in rehearsal and we'd see how it sounded.
The bass trombone part in the Benedicite is already well into the tuba range, and me playing it an octave down was almost entirely made up of pedals. Besides that, they were all marked forte or louder. The trombones thought it was funny that my face changed colors through the entire piece, and we all got a big kick out of the way it sounded, but the director liked it, so I played it that way for the gig.
The other time I had to do that was for the high school orchestra festival we hosted. Basically this was an orchestra made of high school strings and winds, with the majority of the brass coming from our university orchestra for some undisclosed reason. Because the string section was a little over three times the size of a normal one and the brass section was more "regular", we had to blow pretty hard through everything.
I was added to Vaughan Williams again, this time for the English Folksong Suite orchestra arrangement, which again has no tuba. This time, I was asked to double the string basses throughout the piece. This seemed fine to me when the rest of the brass was playing, but there were inevitable times when only the strings played, and these sections turned into strings plus tuba. I thought it sounded odd, and I asked my director in dress rehearsal "are you SURE you want me to play here?" He said "definitely" and winked at me as if to say "and try to keep those basses in tune, please." I still thought it sounded funny.