My Life, As Seen Through The Eyes Of A Tuba

Let’s just start by saying that if I were you, I wouldn’t believe a word of what follows.  I don’t blame you.  I know, however, that every bit of this happened in real life, and then every bit of this was presented to me in the strangest dream ever.

First, I have never had a dream that could have been the script for and Indie Documentary film.  Until now, that is.  I witnessed a series of vignettes (I couldn’t call them scenes because some were rather brief and disjointed.)  The vignettes were a little confusing to me because they did not happen in chronological order.  The very end, like in a well-produced film, brought all of the scenes together and made THE POINT.  I will try to relate to you, in the dream order, what I witnessed of my life, as seen through the eyes of a tuba.

Vignette 1

I see myself on a riverboat, playing tuba in a traditional jazz band.  We embarked at a terminal point on the Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa.  We left about 8:00 pm and will return at about 2:00 am.  The boat was chartered by the Lions, or the Elks, or some other lodge.  It is apparent that they are there simply to drink beer of the cheapest variety.  We are the “entertainment.”  In my heart I believe we are a surprise, an added and lucky feature. 

The audience seemed to like us.  One notable gentleman expresses his delight, partway into our round trip, by coming to visit my tuba and me.  I find myself totally surprised, and not at all happy, when the gentleman pours most of a pitcher of weak beer into the bell of my tuba.  My pique is nothing compared to the feelings expressed by my tuba.  Luckily I quickly found the “spit valve” and the tuba relieved himself, there, on the floor.

Vignette 2

It is the fall of my sophomore year in college.  I am a piano major, of course, but I still enjoy playing my tuba.  Fall means marching band.  I figured I could handle this task, although “sit-down band” is what I really like.  They tell me that if I want to play in a good concert band, I am required to march!  When I find myself marching at a football game, in the middle of South Dakota, and in a blizzard, I am somewhat less than a “happy camper.” 

When my lips freeze to the mouthpiece of the Sousaphone, I rebel.  If you know much about playing a tuba, you know that your mouth interfaces with the mouthpiece in a manner that evokes blowing bubbles in a toilet bowl.  This is a not-altogether unpleasant sensation.  However, the burning of the chill, the tear of the lip flesh when you try, unsuccessfully, to pry your mouth away, is a distinctly unpleasant experience.  Then and there, I decided that my tuba days were done… forever!

Vignette 3

My first tuba lesson!  Mr. Egli sat the beast on my lap.  “Hug it,” he said.  If I had not we both would have heard the crash of brass.  I was shocked how easy it was for me to get a sound from this huge thing.  I wonder if my background of making rude noises and blowing bubbles has prepared me in some way for this life experience.  I started tuba as a lark.  My sister had expressed interest in joining the band.  When she went to the meeting to meet the band director she chose the French horn.  My mother came back and told me that Mr. Egli would like me to begin tuba.  I felt neither heavily pro, or con, so I assented.  I could already read notes, as I had been learning piano for about two years. 

I was a little out of my element at the first band rehearsal.  I only knew a few notes, and they were semi-reliable at best.  The most exciting part of the rehearsal was the end.  The tuba and trombone players were required to take the school-owned mouthpieces out of their horns, and dip them into a two-gallon glass jar filled with a disinfectant.  I whipped my mouthpiece from my horn, swung it into the jar of purple liquid and shook!  Unfortunately the mouthpiece slapped against the inside of the jar.  A perfect, circular whole appeared in the jar about 2/3 of the way to the bottom.  The purple liquid poured out onto the floor.  The scowl of the band director was apparent, and the laughter of almost everyone else echoed in my ears.  Still does, evidently.  We never did get another jar of disinfectant.

Vignette 4

I really am not looking forward to commencement.  In the spring, the entire faculty of the university are required to process, complete with cap, gown and the little colorful thingy that makes it look suspiciously like a bad choir robe.  Some love the pomp.  I didn’t even go to my own commencements, not for any degree.  I figured that the actual diplomas were enough.  One, I had to go to the Field House to retrieve.  The other was mailed unceremoniously.  My parents didn’t seem to mind.  They came to my degree recitals and were sufficiently entertained, and reminded of my acquired genius!  So going to the commencement, as a faculty member, was anathema.  I must have mentioned this.  Of course I would never complain (where is that sarcasm font?) but I found out that the instrumental faculty played in the commencement band, and they didn’t have to gown.

So, after a few years of not playing the tuba, I held the beast one more time.  For rehearsal, and for gig.  Somehow I felt that I won, because I didn’t wear the gown.  I repeated this quite a few years.  Spring Commencement did offer one additional promise… my lips would NOT freeze to the tuba mouthpiece in May in Louisiana. 

Vignette 5

Oh boy!  Here I am, a freshman in high school, and I have just been promoted to 1^st Chair.  This is obviously a big deal.  I had no idea.  The entire band had to go through “challenges.”  We were all given legal-sized sheets of paper; on each side there were melodies written out in every major and minor key.  The rhythms got increasingly complex, and every member of the band were required to play melodies with 16^th notes, dotted notes, triplets of varying types, and even changing meters.  I was led to believe that these melodies were designed for the armed forces bands.  I think they were meant to be used as sight-reading for those musicians.  We were given a week to prepare and undergo an audition.  The band director would delete one point for each wrong note and one for each wrong rhythm.  The seating arrangement for each section was to be determined strictly by this audition.

I took my sheet and practiced every day.  I lived across the street from the school, so I could stay after school and make what progress I was able.  Of course, with a tuba, your practicing was normally done in the school building.  The school owned the instrument, and it was not easy to get permission to take it home, or to even carry the instrument unobtrusively.

I was a little nervous about some of the really tricky keys and rhythms, so I took the trouble to prop a door open in the school after I practiced on Friday.  Nobody found it, and I was able to get into the school on both Saturday and Sunday.  I had the band room to myself, and my tuba and me communed!  I remember running up the steps to the top floor to either get a drink or use the facilities.  When I was returning to the band room I took the stairs by twos or threes.  Unfortunately, I slipped and sprained my ankle.  That day I have invited a couple of my band friends to join me.  They just laughed at my enlarged ankle.  When my mother spotted my limp I convinced her that I was auditioning for a role in a play that required a limp.  I was just practicing.

On audition day I must have done pretty well.  When the results were posted, in order of score, I was at the top.  I didn’t miss any points.  The next in line missed three.  She was a junior clarinet player, and she assumed the 1^st chair of the clarinet section.  Her brother, the son of my former junior high social studies teacher, had been first chair tuba.  I don’t remember his score, but he remembers mine to this day.  His only comment:  “You cheated.  You practiced!”  So it goes, Randy!

Vignette 6

I am in Germany, under the big top of a tent at one of Germany’s ubiquitous beer festivals.  Tuba in hand… or, if you prefer, wrapped in my arms.  The Army Band I am playing with has been using me as an assistant to the Warrant Officer in charge of the band.  I was brought on to keep the top players busy.  I acted as the piano accompanist to men playing every conceivable Hindemith Sonata, as well as other literature.  I arranged and directed a men’s chorus, using songs that I had learned through Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia professional music fraternity.  I played piano in a jazz trio.  We gigged at the Officer’s Club, and the Holiday Inn of Sindelfingen, W. Germany.  AND… I played tuba in the “German Band” segment of our concerts.  We played just about every evening from April through October at some Festival.  We offered segments of traditional American band music, specialty segments and our own German Band.  I got to play tuba many nights in the German Band.  This was really fun.  Much to my shock, after I had retired permanently from playing tuba and freezing my lips, I learned the traditional versions of Alte Kammeraden, and other German drinking songs.    The greatest fun was smuggling out all of those liter and half-liter ceramic German bier steins in my tuba case.  I still have some.  I do feel slightly bad, since all of the bier was free to the band.  All you wanted, all night long.  I came back to the US weighing 190, and brought back many steins!  Thank you, tuba.  Thank you, Germany!

Vignette 7

My high school band director just telephoned my parents.  The Superintendent of my high school had called him with some pointed questions.  “Why,” he expostulated, “was a school-owned Sousaphone seen being marched down the middle of the street in broad daylight?”  Mr. Egli was undoubtedly at a loss for words. 

I had been allowed to take my Sousaphone home over the summer.  The band director, despite the disinfectant incident, liked me and knew that I would make good use of the instrument.  Who would have thought that recruiting your friends, who played trumpet, trombone, clarinet and drums, would NOT make a pleasant noise with their own, personal parade.  We played all of the school songs.  We marched in straight lines.  We played in tune.  We were the best musicians in the band.  When the Superintendent saw us, he didn’t understand.  It now occurs to me that there is no law that prevents a school district from hiring a true Philistine as the Superintendent. 

The let me keep the tuba, but we weren’t allowed to march in the streets for the rest of the summer.  Bummer!

What, you may ask, is the thrust of this epistle?  Why does a mind-mannered piano teacher, a retired college professor, have to do with the tuba as a life-guide?  Glad you asked.  When I auditioned for my job, ultimately as Associate Professor of Piano at Louisiana Tech University, I was joined by hundreds of other candidates.  I prefer to think that I was hired because I simply outplayed all of the rest.  There may be a shred of truth in that, but I was told a few years into my tenure that the Department Head put in the deciding vote.  He was a brass man, himself, and he told the committee that he didn’t want some “practice room nerd” as a new faculty member.  He loved my playing, thought I would contribute to the department as a whole, but the final, deciding factor was… the TUBA.  He thought that anyone that played German music, traditional New Orleans Jazz, and the tuba probably had had the rough-edges knocked off.  My whole career as a pianist and a piano teacher might very well owe itself to my love for the tuba.

There.  If you can’t believe that, I know I’ll never be able to sell you that Brooklyn Bridge.

Skulls Full of Mush…

You really have to love Netflix and some of the other streaming video sites that abound today.  Not only can you catch up on movies you might have missed, but they also have whole seasons of TV programs from the days when “reality TV” meant the news.

I recently introduced my wife to the movie and then the first season of the TV series, The Paper Chase.  The show was set in an Eastern-elite law school that was undoubtedly a thinly veiled Harvard Law School.  John Houseman starred as Professor Kingsfield, the Professor of Contract Law.  Kingsfield famously taught by the Socratic method, where he posed questions and the students answered.

I was so taken by Kingsfield and his demeanor that I undertook to teach a Form & Analysis course purely by the Socratic method.  The preparation was immense, as I had to structure an entire term in the form of prepared questions that would steer the students through the basics of musical form, and prepare them to dissect works as small as Baroque binary dances and large as Brahms Symphonies.

Since I was not Professor Kingsfield, I prepared a massive “script” of questions each week.  The key was teaching the students how they had to prepare for class.  No lectures!  No explanations other than the excellent materials that I chose to support my adventure.  Students were given class participation grades every day.  They only received points when they answered correctly and complely.  If they answered no questions, they received no points.  It didn’t take long to train each student to read the material, work their exercises, and volunteer vociferously to answer my questions.

My job was to have the students, themselves, explain and demonstrate musical form.  The explanations had to meet my criteria:  succinct, clear and pertinent.  By the use of many pieces of music, I could insure that each form would become clear to the entire class by way of varied, detailed and creative analysis.  This project not only worked well, but I taught it in the same format several times.  I loved teaching this way.

So, what did I gain?  I think it is all summed up in Kingsfield’s famous quote:  “You come in here with a skull full of mush and, if you survive, you leave thinking like a lawyer.”  The fictional Kingsfield supposedly had the most brilliant college students in the country.  How could he compare his brilliant student’s minds to mush?  Was he crazy? 

I think he saw the potential in all of his students.  They had raw potential, but were too undisciplined to become the lawyers he saw in them.  He taught them HOW to think, rather than what to think.  That phrase still gives me the chills.  This is what we teachers strive for. 

So, how does this impact my life as a piano teacher?  Glad you asked!  I will try to explain by telling you about three students that I have known and taught.  The first is Daniel. 

When Daniel graduated from college with his engineering degree he was hired by Honeywell, presented with a very nice salary, and sent him wherever Honeywell needed him.  Daniel was brilliant.  He designed switches and controls… think of the controls in a modern thermostat, similar to what you might have on your furnace thermostat.  But Daniel designed controls for the aerospace industry, in which Honeywell is a mainstay. 

Daniel had great difficulty in learning to play the piano.  He was so detail oriented that he tended to try to process each note, each finger, each rhythmic duration, as a unit.  I worked very hard trying to get Daniel to decipher patterns, to understand the spatial relationship between notes, and how that impacted his hand.  I worked with Daniel on the topography and geography of the keyboard.  We made great progress, but Daniel struggled with musical notation and piano playing because he approached it so much like a design project.  I was never able to train that brilliant mind in the way a musician needs to think.

The second student is Stan.  Stan is now a full professor of bio-medical engineering.  He acquired his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate in five years.  I remember Stan informing me that he worked at the piano faithfully for 30 minutes every day.  He apologized about the brevity.  But Stan learned to accomplish as much in his 30 minutes as many piano majors did in hours.  I helped him to understand how practice was much like isolating and solving an engineering problem.  Stan was able to back up, see the broader demands of his music and approach his work not only in a strict engineering sense, but also in a creative manner that allowed him to win a competition to play with an orchestra and perform in a Master Class for the great John Browning.

Here we see two engineering students, both brilliant.  One succeeded at the piano and one struggled.  I could even say that both came to me with relative minds of mush.  Thinking like a pianist took a little extra effort.

The last student is Stefan.  I hired Stefan every summer to mow my lawn, and sometimes to water our gardens when we were gone. I thought of Stefan this past weekend as I was mowing my parents’ yard.  When I lived at home their yard was a simple, unadorned lawn.  It didn’t take long to mow then… or I never took very long with it.  How changed it is now, with birdbaths, feeders, little islands of plants and gardens.  The yard is a geometric splash of interesting and beautiful things.  And it is a challenge to mow.  So many angles, and so many details.  One has to think about how to approach the lawn efficiently and carefully. 

I remember distinctly a comment Stefan made to me one summer after I had created little planting areas, with stone borders, around many of our trees.  We built a little garden path with limestone, put in several gardens, an arboreal arch, bird feeders, etc.  I asked Stefan how it was to mow the yard after all the additions.  He said, “it’s a little tricky, and it takes while, but I guess that’s the price you pay to have a cool yard!”  Stefan, who now has a fantastic job at Facebook and previously at Google, designing software for them, learned through practicing the piano how to be a detail-oriented person… how to be a creative problem solver.  Like wading through the technical and musical demands of the most intricate piano piece, Stefan learned to negotiate the lawn, with all its impediments, and to do a marvelous job.  Now, he does the same for tech companies!

None of these students really had minds of mush; but I do know that the work that we all did together has impacted their lives in many ways.  Becoming skilled pianists and consummate musicians changed them.  It helped them to see how a mind can be disciplined and used to its brilliant capacity.  Let’s just say, “You’re Welcome, Honeywell.  You’re welcome, Google.”  When they left me they were thinking like musicians.