Tuba and euphonium festival brings the ‘heavy metal’ to Emory’s Schwartz Center

There’s a bad joke that Adam Frey, an artist affiliate in Emory’s Department of Music, loves to tell. 

A child says she wants to learn to play tuba. After she gets home late from the second lesson, her mother asks where she’s been.

“‘Well, Mom, on the first lesson, my teacher taught me four notes. And after my second lesson, I got a gig!’” says Frey. “Because, you know, people like to say the tuba only plays four notes.”

The International Euphonium and Tuba Festival aims to dispel the stereotype that the largest instrument in the brass family is only good for playing “oompa-oompa” in polka bands. Frey, the festival’s artistic director, is also president of the International Tuba Euphonium Association.

Now in its 23rd year, the event convenes musicians at all levels for lessons with top players from around the world at Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. This year’s festival, taking place June 14-20, includes two free public performances by participants, in celebration of the tuba and its slightly smaller, higher-pitched cousin, the euphonium. 

The concerts are set for Wednesday, June 17, and Saturday, June 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Schwartz Center’s Emerson Concert Hall. No tickets are required.

The June 17 concert will include musicians from the Georgia Brass Band and solo performances by Ada Brooks, Phillip Broome, Tim Buzbee and Frey. The June 20 concert will feature accompaniment by Jon Easter on Emerson Hall’s Werner Wortsman Memorial Organ. Easter is assistant conductor to Emory’s concert choir.

Frey likens the music of 150 tubas and euphoniums ringing through Emerson Hall to “a tour-de-force of sound” and “a sonic warm blanket.”

The concerts showcase both the power and scope of the two instruments, which Frey considers the most flexible in the brass family. “Number one, they can play beautiful, sustained chords,” he says. “But they also have this incredible four-and-a-half octave range and unbelievable technical versatility.” 

Selections at both concerts will highlight the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Saturday’s performance will include the theme from “Jurassic Park” and will conclude with the finale from Camille Saint-Saens’ “Organ Symphony.”

Tuba nerds unite

Frey founded the festival on Emory’s campus in 2003.

“There is nothing else like this, that is both educational and performance-based,” for brass players, he says. 

His favorite part? It’s a place to “nerd out” about all things tuba and euphonium. “My family calls it ‘Euphonium and Tuba Geek Week,’” he says. 

During lunch breaks on campus, “someone will be talking about a practice exercise that really helped them, while someone at another table will be like, ‘Well, if I use this particular fingering combination for this piece, it sounds better.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes! This is exactly what we want.’”

The event has a reunion vibe, he says, recalling a group of musicians who gather annually in a dorm room to listen to tuba and euphonium recordings and debate their relative merits. 

A challenging instrument

For those seeking a future in brass, just putting your lips together and blowing won’t get you to mastery, according to Frey. 

Playing tuba or euphonium requires “very intricate, super-fine motor coordination” of numerous muscles around the lips, he explains, paired with continual changes in air quantity and speed. “I liken it to the tolerance of a mistake in golf,” he says. A slight miscalculation can lead to a shot — or a note — that is way off course.

“The big joke we have in our field is, ‘Oh, if I just had a different valve oil or a different mouthpiece, I’m sure I would be so much better,’” he says, “And it’s like: ‘No, you just need to practice more!’”

The tuba, invented in Germany in 1835, and the euphonium, invented in Austria in 1843, are the youngest members of the brass group, which also includes the trumpet family, the trombone family and French horns. 

Frey, who wrote his master’s dissertation on the history of the tuba and euphonium, explains that they’re descendants of the ophicleide, an early brass instrument that was notoriously difficult to tune.

Hector Berlioz wrote his “Symphonie Fantastique” for two ophicleides in 1830. Because the instrument was “so bad,” says Frey, Berlioz had the two musicians play in different keys so that a sour note in one would be canceled out by the other.

In the late 1800s, the musical landscape fluctuated as “people invented all sorts of different weird instruments,” says Frey. One brass creation had two bells — the wide, flared openings that project sound. “One bell was like a euphonium, and there was an additional, smaller bell, sort of like a trombone,” says Frey. “So, you could get two different tones.”

Then there was the guy in Belgium. “He made one instrument with seven different bells. Each was supposed to be perfectly tuned like each of the [existing] brass instruments,” says Frey. “They were not. And it was really, really heavy.”

The tuba and euphonium, as we know them today, hold down the low end of the musical scale in classical orchestras, marching bands, Mexican banda groups, New Orleans jazz combos and many other ensembles and styles.

Frey is excited to teach musicians who bring their experience in different genres to the festival. But what he’s looking forward to most is the music made by 150 tuba and euphonium players during the public concerts at Emerson Hall. 

“A lot of community members have told me, ‘I’ve never heard anything like this,’” he says. “There’s just nothing like being in front of a group of that size with that sound. It’s very musically gratifying.”