Huntingdonshire Music School Association

From Tubanews:

Tuba Carols 2009 is on Sunday 13th December at 12.45 until 14.30 in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Please tell all your Tuba / euphonium / baritone/ sousaphone / helicon / ophecleide / serpent / cimbasso playing friends, and of course, put the date in your own diary.

Music (4 parts, with descants, all clefs) will be provided, also chairs, you will need to bring a music stand.
Last year we managed a fantastic 54 players and collected £780 for charity. (Watch last year’s on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J879e_ntkn0 )

This year it would be great if we could manage 75 + players! We’ll be collecting for The Prostate Cancer Research Foundation (www.thepcrf.org), who’s fundraising campaign using the memory of Bob Monkhouse is, I’m sure, already familiar to many of you.

I look forward to hearing all of you on Sunday 13th December!

Best regards, Chris Ludwig, Tuba Carols.

tubacarols@ntlworld.com

I suppose it had to happen. Not content with playing in the bowels of the RRS Les Dawson Keith decided to practice in front of a larger audience. Usually this is a good thing and we would advise any music student to practice in front of strange folks in order to build up confidence. Keith took this advice to heart but being unable to find any humans willing to endure instead decided that the local wildlife in Antarctica would do. I don’t think that the BAS have conducted any studies on the tolerance of the penguin to such noise but hope that it doesn’t affect fertility (penguins!). Those with a keen eye will notice that 1 penguin in the centre appears to have been stunned (or at least has found something better to do). 

It does remind of a Creature Comforts clip. I just wonder what the penguins are saying…!

As Keith himself says:-

I was on the afterdeck working when this lot turned up.  They’ve been loitering around the ship (which is moored up at Brunt Ice Shelf at the moment) for a couple of days now, and I got Bruce to take this.  As you will see, he’s enthusiastic about fill-in flash.  These are Emperor Penguins (as if you didn’t know).

Nice scenery.

Are you a brass player? The mouthpiece is critical to the sound and tone that you produce and is a highly personal match to the player - definitely not a case of one size fits all!

Having recently taken up the tuba and struggled with changing mouthpieces I’d like to find out more about how the design influences the sound. This article at Wikipedia is a useful start.