A Christmas Story

by Chronos

In December of 1993, as in every December, fifteen young men took their place on the stage of Benedictine High School for the annual band Christmas concert. I was on tuba, the only virtuoso of that noble instrument the school had seen for a decade previous. Our program consisted of a combination of the pieces we had been working on through the semester (none of which I now remember), and an assortment of religious Christmas songs, such as the Ave Maria.

Now, of course, we had had plenty of practice on the non-seasonal material, having played it continually over the semester, in practice and performances. The Christmas songs, however, were only performed once a year, so naturally, we hadn't practiced them as much. In actual point of fact, we hadn't practiced them at all. Now, this was not actually that big of a deal: In a show of confidence in our abilities, the director had made it a point to choose arrangements written for elementary school bands, in the third grade or so. There were only a handful of eighth notes in the entire set of work, nothing shorter, and the range was within the standard concert scale of each instrument. Even such a ragtag bunch as we should have no problem sight reading such music.

The more attentive reader may have noticed a slight problem with this plan: No third grader plays tuba, and there was therefore no tuba part in an arrangement for third grade band. The closest which could be found was bass clef music for a baritone horn, a full octave above the tuba's range. Very well, I would just play the same part, transposed down an octave.

Now tell me, how many of you have ever transposed a piece in real time, on your first seeing of said piece?

The only notes I recognized were those which I might occasionally play myself, and being a tubist, that meant that I only recognized those towards the bottom of the baritone's range. The higher notes, I skipped entirely, rather than running the risk of easily-recognizable discord. It was not until after the concert that a friend pointed out the monster I had created instead. That night in the Benedictine High school auditorium, I found out what happens when a tubist plays only sporadically, and in the lower half of the scale.

For that night saw the first, and God willing, only, performance of the Ave Maria Polka.