Specters

In the places and in the ensembles where I’ve lived and played, there seemed to always be a number of followers, people that were just there, day to day and year to year. It didn’t seem to be important where or what the ensemble was; it was almost as though it was the same people, whether it was Rochester in the 50s, Amsterdam in the 60s, Los Angeles in the late 60s, 70s and 80s or Florence in the 90’s. They sat in the hall and listened to the rehearsals, usually in the same seat, and usually they wore the same clothes. There was the elegant old woman who would move to the music, whatever it was she was listening to, as though she had conducted it numerous times. There was the old man with an intense, brooding, Beethovenesque expression on his face, looking always very critical, and there was the attractive young girl holding a single rose with a look and demeanor from generations passed.

Generally, there was very little communication between these groupie specters and the musicians in the orchestra. When the rehearsal was over these followers and the orchestra musicians found there own exits into their own worlds, and most of the time we never saw these people other than from our seat in the orchestra.

In my years with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra between the 56/57 season and the 61/62 seasons, there was such a man. Although totally benign, he had that look of intensity and concentration, like the busts of a brooding Beethoven that I’ve seen in concert halls where I’ve played all over the world. He was present at most of the rehearsals during those 6 years I played in Rochester, and as he listened he was always writing; he had a score and he had manuscript paper.

One morning in rehearsal, when I wasn’t playing the concerto, I went into the hall to listen to the soloist and by chance sat directly behind the old man. Quickly, I lost interest in the rehearsal and found myself completely captivated by what this old man was writing. Basically, he was crossing certain things out of the score, but it wasn’t clear what or why. When the break arrived I introduced myself and asked what he was doing. He was very surprised, as it may have been the first time he had ever talked to an orchestra member, and he was quite excited that someone was interested.

I was amazed as he told me of his lifetime project. For the past 20 years this old man had been attending rehearsals, listening and crossing out all the orchestration that was not audible. He would cross out what he couldn’t hear and go home and rewrite the score without all the superfluous and inaudible passages. At this point he reached into his old, worn briefcase and handed me a complete handwritten score to Brahms 2nd Symphony with all the passages he couldn’t hear deleted.

Of course, the easy reaction to this story is to envision it as the crazy ideas of an eccentric old man. But wait! Wouldn’t it be interesting to spend a day with an orchestra reading this man’s modifications and give his 20-year project a moment of consideration? Who knows for sure what we would hear. Surely we would be a little smarter by the end of that day.

It’s sad in a way. Nobody knows this man’s name. Nobody knows where he lived, and nobody knows where the material of this 20-year project is. What we would have learned is probably lost forever.

A symphony orchestra tubist is blessed or damned, depending on your point of view on any particular day, with an embarrassment of inactive time; the most difficult part of the job was to remember where you are and to know where to come in. Symphony orchestra tubists have lots of time to observe, to think and to dream. I used to joke that I was the highest paid symphony orchestra musician in the USA per note! Maybe it was even true. I wonder how many kilometers I walked in my 35 years of full time orchestra playing, while I paced back and forth backstage during tacit tuba parts?

During my years in Los Angeles, after returning from two years with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, an incredibly similar old man to the one that deleted inaudible orchestration was still visible; he was there all the time, year after year, brooding and intensely listening. It was in the Hollywood Bowl, which was the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

I had seen him out in the amphitheater of Hollywood Bowl for a couple of years before the day came when we found ourselves walking from the parking lot together for a morning rehearsal. We greeted each other; I heard that he had a thick Eastern Europe accent and I asked him where he was from.

“Russia, I was born in Moscow.”



“What’s your connection with symphonic music? I’ve seen you out in the audience almost every rehearsal for a couple of years.”


“I’m a musician. I used to play percussion. I played in the Moscow Youth Symphony when I was a boy.”



Like the old man in Rochester, it seemed this was the first time he had had contact with anyone in the orchestra; this is not because of rudeness of orchestra musicians but simply because their paths almost never crossed. I listened and as we walked toward the stage. I began wishing it was a lot further away, wishing that walk would last a very long time and wishing the rehearsal wasn’t going to start in five minutes.

“I played in the Moscow Youth Orchestra in my teen age years. We used to rehearse every Saturday. I played timpani. I loved playing, and I still miss it even today. We had great conductors come and work with us. Sometimes Tchaikovsky would come and play something he wrote with us, just to see how it sounded with the orchestration. Once he brought in the Andante Cantabile from the 5th Symphony. Oh, you should have heard that boy who played 1st horn, oh; he was such a wonderful player. I think Tchaikovsky loved him; after the reading of the part with the horn solo Tchaikovsky stopped the orchestra; he was crying and he walked through the orchestra to the boy who played the solo and gave him a big kiss on the lips… Well, I’ll go take my seat now, I enjoyed talking to you, have a good rehearsal. Goodbye.”



I couldn’t wait to meet him again. I saw him a couple of more times that week from the stage but I was preoccupied with other things, and then I never saw him again. I had never even asked his name.

In the 70’s there were two strange women who became almost a peripheral part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. One was young and in her 20’s. She usually dressed in white and held a red rose in her hands. At performances, during the applause, she would stand up and hold the rose to her heart with a haunted look on her face. She reminded me of a young girl who I remember having seen in a film, or perhaps films, who was in love with a young Beethoven or some other classical superstar; she was essentially a nineteenth century groupie following her object of infatuation from concert to concert. I talked to this girl several times and found her very attractive; she was intelligent, multilingual and the personification of how I would imagine a 19th century girl. Even with my proclivity to younger women this girl in fact was about 100 years too old for me and my 20th century 60’s fads and fashions. The last I heard, she had fallen in love with a fencing master. Perhaps she had found her compatible time zone.

During the same period there was another misplaced person from another time. This woman was old, surely in her 80’s, and dressed in the high fashion style of Europe in the 1920’s. Who was she and why was she following us on our tours throughout the United States and Europe? She had a chronic smile, as if painted on her face, which was very disconcerting as she moved with the music, every phrase and every note! She was a true specter.

Neither of these chronologically misplaced women were ever seen at the same time and in my science fiction, Star Trek episode imagination I mused that these two women were the same entity, a time traveler that for some reason was attracted to the symphony orchestras of the 20th century. I wonder if she (they) is (are) ever seen anymore. I hope she has found what she was looking for.

Edinburgh, Scotland, April, 2004

Revised June 11, 2012, Tokyo

Mouthpieces 2012 - The Volare

The past few months have seen an impressive introduction of new mouthpieces endorsed by highly respected artists. Most of these great players, who already have their own personalized ‘signature’ mouthpieces available on the market, continue experimenting to develop something still better. Of course, this is a good thing, it is a perfect example of how our equipment is evolving and always improving.

Ironically, this also presents a problem. For example, if there are ten new great mouthpieces available on the market, indorsed by highly respected players, what is the best way for a tubist to find and test these mouthpieces; buying ten new mouthpieces on the contingency that one might be the ‘right one’ isn’t an option. Mouthpieces are expensive! Personally, not being a business man and having no marketing experience, I can see only four possibilities: advertising, sending samples to a few strategic players, sending examples to a few music shops but finally and most expediently depending on ‘word of mouth’ to reach the members of our unique community.

Once, a very long time ago, I decided to sell tubas. Short summary: I didn’t like it, I was not good at it, and it made me unhappy; I will not do it again. We have people that are good at it and who enjoy that aspect of the music business.
Why do I mention this? Very soon there will be a new mouthpiece, yet another new mouthpiece, with my name on it, it’s called The Volare. Having taken part in it’s development, having played and compared it with many other mouthpieces and having listened to many players playing it, I can say the results are all positive and impressive; The Volare has a focused, clear, and centered tone, the sound it produces very warm, dynamic response very efficient and sensitive, plus intonation is beautifully delineated yet flexible.

I promise this will be the end of my try at salesmanship; I’ll leave that to the businessmen and the promoters. Please watch for this new mouthpiece, The Volare, and audition it when you get the chance.

And the tuba evolution continues.

Roger Bobo

Tokyo, June 10, 2012

Life with the tuba

This is April 2012, and it’s been 67 years since I started playing brass instruments. The first five years, since I was 7, was playing the cornet, and then in 1950 I moved up to the tuba.

From my present position in the world, I try to keep a view toward the future; it’s a philosophy of mine and I think it’s a good philosophy. However, I’m sure the 67 years of retrospective provide a strong foundation, which allows me to proceed into the future with greater vision.

It must have been 1943 on that cold Christmas time Sunday morning when, while sitting on my father’s shoulders, that I first heard the sound of brass instruments ringing from that church tower in Los Angeles. It rang like magical bells, I had never heard anything like it before and I can remember it perfectly even to this day. I’m absolutely sure that morning was a defining moment in my life.

Another formative sonic memory came several years later while I was singing in the boy’s choir of that same church. After the Saturday morning choir rehearsals I would usually escape and hide in the church’s organ pipe room while the organist was practicing. That was another magical experience, but it was also a powerful acoustical experience. Those pipes were not designed to be heard from only a few meters away in a closed room; the low notes of the huge diapason pipes were so intense they tickled my eardrums. Since that time I’ve always loved to hear powerful low frequency sounds like the ‘hiding in the pipe room’ days.

I really didn’t love playing the cornet but I could play a little and I knew several melodies. I wanted to continue with music when I finished elementary school but not on cornet. During an outing with some of the musically talented kids from my school, we went to visit the band room of our local high school. Of course, we were told not to touch anything bit it was love at first sight when I saw a Sousaphone coiled in the back of the room. Without thinking I found myself seated and enveloped by the big brass beast. Before I could be stopped I was playing the same melodies I knew on cornet. It was easy; it worked exactly like the cornet but two octaves lower. It felt good, the sound was rich and mellow and I had attracted a crowd of kids and teachers. Of course, when I had finished I got in trouble but that only made the tuba more attractive, it was the forbidden fruit syndrome!

From that time on I was hooked, always vacillating between dedication, obsession and sometimes fanaticism. In the world today there are many kids and young people who hold that same kind of tuba passion I had in the 50s, but at that time I was pretty much alone. When people learned my goal in life was to become a tubist, they were a little uncomfortable and soon that made me uncomfortable too. That never changed my will to become a tubist but it did cause me sometimes to feel that the tuba was my cross to bear or sometimes I thought of it as the heavy stone that Sisyphus had strapped to his back for eternity

I felt that image so strongly that I later commissioned composer John Stevens to write a solo piece for tuba called THE LIBERATION OF SISYPHUS, which has now become a major work in the solo tuba repertoire. I have never counted the number of works for tuba that I have commissioned, requested or had dedicated to me but I’m sure it’s in the hundreds; I’m very proud of that.

As time passed, my tuba playing was developing in two ways, as a soloist and as a symphony orchestra player. Through my high school days I played in many community orchestras, all-city and all-state high school orchestras, and in what was called the National High School Orchestra at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. The symphony orchestra had completely become the center of my social life, and in that setting were all my friends

After graduating from high school in 1956 I went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. During the first week at Eastman I auditioned and was accepted into the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. I was not ready for this remarkable opportunity but in those days there were only two players auditioning, astonishing when we see the realities of today when frequently there are over one hundred applicants for an orchestra position.

While at Eastman my student colleagues and I would frequently listen to recorded performances from orchestras all over the world and tried to guess which orchestra and from which country we were listening to. It wasn’t so difficult then, especially international styles were easy to discriminate. When I first heard the Chicago Symphony brass section in the 1950s I thought it was the most wonderful brass playing I had ever heard; I still think that was the best brass section of all time, and still those players remain my brass player icons.

I have to mention that in 1957 I was privileged to play second tuba to William Bell in the New York Philharmonic when they passed through Rochester on tour. I was 19 and excited beyond belief. I worked hard for a career playing tuba, but there was another thing working in my favor; extraordinary good luck and it seems to still be happening!

In 1962 I played a recital in Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City. It was New York’s first ever tuba recital and I was lucky enough to receive very good reviews. This recital turned out to be the most significant thing I had done and the following publicity was amazing and a little unsettling. Today I wish I had followed that direction of being a soloist more intensely but the orchestra was very fulfilling for me and it offered security that I wasn't able to envision as a soloist.

My curiosity concerning nationalistic musical styles led me to write 20 letters to various orchestras in Europe inquiring about possible tuba openings. Two of these orchestras had openings! (It was that embarrassment of extraordinary good luck again). The Suisse Romand Orchestra of Geneva, Switzerland and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, Holland both had tuba openings. To make a long story short, I auditioned for both of them, was offered both jobs, and I chose the Concertgebouw. After two years playing in the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam I returned to my home city of Los Angeles and played in the Philharmonic there for the next 25 years.

Shortly after I started playing the tuba in 1950 my sisters gave me a recording of Tubby The Tuba. Of course, I was too old for that story by that time but because of my love for the tuba I was fascinated by the story, plus there was superb tuba playing on the recording I had. Many times subsequently I humorously have thought that I was actually becoming the personification of Tubby, the need to play a solo, the need to be heard and even, as Tubby experienced, the occasional ridicule by my peers. My own sense of humor has saved me from taking that rejection too seriously but that same humor was not strong enough to spare me the frustration of certain chronic episodes: often, conductors, mostly German or Russian and most of whom I admired, would sometimes speak ‘baby talk’ to the tubist: “…and now the great big tuba becomes the great big bear” or “Tuba, you need to be a very scary dragon”. However, I never showed my anger.

There were only a very few such negatives. Through the years I would very occasionally encounter a student who didn’t like my ideas and thought he knew more about how a tuba should sound than I did. They have all disappeared from the tuba world!

I had to develop tact, humor, kindness and especially perseverance in training stage crew and tour managers who thought I was just purposely harassing them because I would usually need two or more tubas with me on stage or on tour.

I developed a pathological fear of checking in at airports with tubas because of rules that were never the same from flight to flight.

The existence of conservative shortsighted tubists, regarding their relatively new instrument in the musical world with relatively little history, has always amazed me.

This always-present factor of good luck was at its strongest when it came to my teachers through the years, I was extremely fortunate to have superb and inspirational teachers. They taught me to love playing. As much as I loved playing I was surprised to find that after I stopped playing, I grew to love teaching even more. I have found that the every student is unique and requires unique treatment; I needed to use my brain more than I did as an orchestra player. After 25 years in the Los Angeles Philharmonic I took a one-year sabbatical and went to Italy; I never returned the Los Angeles Philharmonic!

I held several teaching positions while living in Europe: Fiesole Scuola di Musica, Italy, Conservitoire de Lausanne, Switzerland, Conservatory of Bern, Switzerland, Rotterdam Conservatory, Holland and the Royal Northern Collage of Music, Manchester, England. For three years I held all these positions simultaneously. During that three-year period I was also making frequent trips to Spain, Greece and Canada. It was very tiring but I still enjoyed it. Now the good luck still abounds with a full time faculty position with the Musashino Academia Musicae in Tokyo, Japan, one of the world’s great music schools. I expect to continue my work there as long as my body stays strong and my mind stays clear. It’s a very personal thing but having lived many places in the world, Japan stands as my first choice.

I have also been lucky in the number of students I’ve taught who are now making a good living playing or teaching. I have started to make a list of my working students several times but it’s proven to be difficult. Where do we draw the line? There are students who have studied four years in a conservatory situation, those who have studied for a year, a few weeks in a summer masterclass, those who have had only a few lessons and even those who have taken only one lesson. Can I call them all my students? In any case, teaching has become the most satisfying aspect of my musical life.

The students today have entered into a new dimension of technique and musicality, to a degree that would have been unimaginable when I started 60 years ago. I was discussing this recently with Roland Szentpali, the Hungarian tuba virtuoso, and he presented me the best accolade I’ve ever received.

Roland wrote: “It’s just not the same; now there are lots of players who can play at a high level and a few tubists who are creative and original and even fewer that are versatile...but you were an UFO”... Roland Szentpali

The past has given me the experience to look to the future to continue the tuba experience in whatever form it evolves. I am very thankful to all those that have helped me accrue these experiences.

April 9, 2012, Tokyo Japan

Hearing realistically

Since I stopped playing ten years ago, I’ve been experiencing frequent reoccurring dreams. It seems just closing that tuba case for the last time did not remove it from the more hidden corners of my mind; 60 years of constant life with an instrument just doesn’t go away easily.

These dreams, or nightmares, which ever they are, started with me finding myself seated in front of an orchestra playing a concerto and discovering that I’d never heard the music before, not knowing when to make the entrance or what to play. In some dreams I frequently was sitting in the back row of the orchestra with the brass section playing a Bruckner or Mahler symphony and realizing I had not played in years and was totally tuba nonfunctional. I would wake up panicked.

After over a year of not playing, the dreams turned to another direction of anxiety. Here are a few: When playing in a strange hall, I was unable to find my way to the stage, there were stairways that led to dead ends, elevators that went to the wrong floors and the chronic problem of simply not being able to find my tuba. There were many times I would miss the bus, miss the plane, lose my concert clothes, or forget my black shoes! Perhaps the most ominous scene of all was going on stage and finding no chair or music stand for the tuba and when going back stage to get help there was nobody there. I’m still working on what it all means!

The frequency of these dreams has dramatically dropped in the last few months after a ten year break from playing, which I surmise is because I’ve started practicing again; I was encouraged to do so by esteemed colleagues at Musashino Academia Musicae, and other musician friends, who suggested that my students would greatly benefit if I were to play occasionally during my lessons. This has proven to be true.

Playing a brass instrument is very similar to athletic function, like basketball, track or swimming; aging decreases our ability to function at the same efficiency that we are able to reach in our youth. This is particularly true regarding tuba because of the necessary required large amount of air; vital capacity decreases with age. I was instantly struck, when I began playing again, by the fact that the instrument seemed much heavier that it did ten years before and that my air capacity was obviously diminished. This meant that the phrases I could play ten years ago in one breath were simply impossible now… very frustrating. I decided to stop performing in 2002 because I could feel those signs of aging, because I could hear those signs of aging.

In the last few months since I started playing again I have happily progressed from being absolutely nonfunctional to playing simple pieces almost well. I became my own teacher and applied the same methods I would use with students in managing air supply problems. At first, I was so encouraged by my progress that I forgot my knowledge and experience in hearing older players passing their prime; it’s a sad sound, the tone quality starts to get thin, there is an audible shake in the sustained passages and, of course, that telltale sound when a player begins running out of air. It’s sadder still when an aging player doesn’t hear the change.

I was tempted to perform again; in fact, in a moment of weakness I even promised I would play one piece (a very easy piece) on a recital with my good friend and old student Roland Szentpali next month. However, after two months of practicing an hour almost every day and progressing almost to the level I was in 2002 at my final concert, I needed to remember that the reason I stopped playing at that time was because that playing level had audibly dropped!

I will continue to practice, but maybe only for a short time each day, and I will occasionally play in the lesson room for my students. Fortunately, my ears seem to still function in a discerning way, which should keep me out of trouble; the idea of playing for students is that it should be exemplary. Speriamo! Roger

May 1, 2012, Tokyo, Japan

SOLO - Marco Pierobon Trumpet

Personal and Powerful

I have always made it a policy in my blogs to avoid writing reviews and in the last five years or so, since I started the blogs, I have only written two, one for trumpet and one for ophiclide; I have never written one for tuba and probably never will.

In the past few years there has been a surge in the number of solo trumpet CDs released and many of them have been wonderful, but in most cases a piece of the puzzle has been missing; in the new CD, SOLO, with Italian trumpet player Marco Pierobon, the puzzle is complete. Marco Pierobon has the power of Bud Herseth, the 19th century awareness of Timofei Dokshizer, the technical freedom of Rafael Mandez and the great lead player skill of Harry James. But there is more!

In this CD we can listen to an extraordinary assortment of repertoire:
Alexander Arutiunian: Trumpet Concerto in Ab Major
Oskar Böhme: Trumpet Concerto, transcribed for winds by Goeffery Bergler
James Curnow: Concertpiece
George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, arranged by Timofei Dokshizer
Alexander Goedicke: Concert Study
Michele Mangani: Theme for Trumpet (written for Macro Pierobon)
Allen Vizzutti: American Jazz Suite.

All of these great pieces can certainly stand-alone, but Marco’s versatility in these performances is absolutely amazing; quite simply, all the various styles represented are exactly right. But there is still one more thing that needs to be pointed out: Marco is Italian and as well the comparisons with the great trumpet players mentioned above, he has that visceral passionate musicality that we associate with Luciano Pavarotti. For example, every time I listen to the THEME FOR TRUMPET by Michele Mangani it makes the hairs on my arms stand up.

By the way Michele Mangani is the conductor of the Orchestra di Fiati delle Marche (Marche Wind Orchestra), which is the very able band accompanying this album.

In all fairness I have to disclose Marco was one of my students in the mid 90s when I was working with the brass of the Italian Youth Orchestra at the Fiesole Scuola di Musica in Toscana. I’m sure I haven’t allowed that association to influence this review. Please listen to this remarkable CD and judge for yourself.

Tokyo, September 11, 2011

Bonus - take a look at this short video for an insight into Marco Pierobon's playing (watch all of it) http://youtu.be/EFAdbrejDBc