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The tuba is an instrument with depth of tone and yet a buoyant and agile personality.  Thus, it seems uniquely suited to music with a nautical flavor such as these Chanties and Ballads: Songs of the Sea.

The first movement, -Coming Up For Air,+ features a jaunty melody for the tuba with ascending scale runs and glissandi suggestive of rising up to the surface.

-Far From Home+ is a ballad -- perhaps a lament sung by a homesick sailor. Sounds of the ship+s rigging may be heard in the percussion.

The final movement, -Bonny Tuba,+ is a set of variations on a well-known melody.  There is the customarily somber (perhaps sunken) variation in the minor mode followed by a virtuosic triplet arpeggiation variation.  Since the performance skills of a fine tuba player are intended to be seen as well as heard, the tuba mute becomes a featured visual element in this movement.

Chanties and Ballads was completed during the summer of 1995 in the composer+s studio on the Brainstorm Dairy Farm in Braintree, Vermont.  Geographically remote, the ocean was nonetheless present in the imagination!

Gwyneth Walker

Chanties and Ballads is a fifteen minute concerto for tuba and orchestra in three movements that takes great advantage of the lyrical and technical capacities of the solo tuba within an orchestration context that most orchestras can program without extensive rehearsals or hiring of extra personnel.  The score calls for paired winds, two trumpets, two horns, one trombone, two percussion, and strings.  Because of the brilliant scoring and emphasis on accessibility of sound, most college and community orchestras should be able to bring the parts up to speed within an average preparation period for a concert.  The range of the solo tuba part is extensive from CCC to g1 with a suggested ossia in one place in the first movement of c2 although the characteristic range is within and below the staff for most of the piece.  The first movement, Coming Up For Air is described by Walker as -a jaunty melody for the tuba with ascending scale runs and glissandi suggestive of rising up to the surface.+  The second movement is entitled Far From Home and is a beautifully written ballad featuring interplays and exchanges between winds, canonic trumpets, solo trombone, and strings all integrating with the solo tuba line.  It also includes a unique orchestration device of one of the percussionists pulling on block and tackle rigging to imitate the hoisting of a sail.  The final movement, Bonny Tuba, begins with a Jaws style musical opening that quickly transforms into a set of theme and variations of the well known folk tune My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean which include among other things, a minor key variation, a triplet variation, and at one point, extensive theatrical manipulations of the mute.

...With a combination of clever and accessible writing and a virtuosic but playable solo part, Chanties and Ballads is the most original and fresh tuba concerto this reviewer has ever played. it was premiered by The Millikin-Decatur Symphony, A. Wesley Tower, conductor and Mark Nelson, tuba soloist on February 4, 1996...

Mark Nelson, Millikin University
Published in the Sprint T.U.B.A. Journal

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