International Tuba Day on 1 May
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Tomorrow, the first Friday in May, is International Tuba Day! This day recognizes “tubists in musical organizations around the world who have to go through the hassle of handling a tuba,” according to the official website.
One of the most famous works for tuba is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Concerto for Tuba and Orchestra in F minor. Composers have also paired our lowest wind instrument with our highest. R. Winston Morris and Daniel Perantoni’s Guide to the Tuba Repertoire lists five pieces for tuba and piccolo.
What does a tuba look like if you stretch it out completely? Like the picture in the upper corner! This instrument, built in 1913, is in the Museum of Musical Instruments in Markneukirchen, Germany. It is playable but mostly used in parades today.
To find music for tuba in the RISM online catalog, use an Advanced search and select the field All fields. Enter the RISM abbreviation, tb. This will retrieve the over 2,000 sources with a tuba. Use the filters on the left to narrow your search.
A note for advanced RISM users: If you search the field Scoring for tb, you will retrieve results where the tuba is listed in the Scoring summary. These works tend to be smaller ensemble pieces, and you only get 21 results. Searching in All fields is a more effective way of getting music for a particular instrument. We are aware that this situation isn’t ideal, and we hope to find a better solution.
There are links to over 50 digitized scores with tuba in the online catalog, including works by Brahms, Dvořák, Rubinstein, Sibelius, and Wagner.
Happy Tuba Day!
Photo credit: Elongated tuba made by Emil Körner, via Wikimedia Commons. The instrument is in the Musikinstrumenten-Museum Markneukirchen.
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