Tubaman

The tuba, grandfather grunt of all brass instruments, weighs about 40 Ib. It has over six yards of tubing. It has to ride in baggage cars. Its master has to have the heart and lungs of an athlete. Yet he is considered a very ordinary fellow compared with the long-haired violinist who sits up front in the orchestra, runs a bow over a set of strings without much physical exertion. As if tubamen did not have a hard enough time already, big William Bell of the Cincinnati Symphony recently invented a still more demanding tuba. He played it for the first time in Manhattan this week, at the opening of the Goldman Band Concerts given the city each summer by the Florence and Daniel Guggenheim Foundation.

Cincinnati seems to be the seat of tuba experiments. Tubaman James Austin Houston who plays in radio station WLW has a bellows contraption called an aerophor attached to his instrument (TIME, Dec. 14, 1931). He pumps it with his foot to shoot auxiliary air up through a hose into his mouth where, by a special facial technique, he shoots it back into the instrument. Tubaman Houston is puny. His aerophor is purely a lung-saving device. William Bell's invention is not for weak tubamen. It does the work of two tubas--a double bass and a baritone. It has two mouthpieces, two sets of tubing (together more than 16 yd. long), weighs 50 Ib. It goes deeper than any tuba has ever gone before, deeper than any music has ever been written.

Tubaman Bell deftly shifted his instrument about this week, blew first on one mouthpiece and then on the other, getting a four-octave range as against the two and a half octaves possible on a normal tuba. Two tubamen can play on Bell's instrument at the same time but they would have to be ambidextrous to avoid interference on the single set of valves.

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