Word: tubas
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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...
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...
When one Farnham Fox, a tuba player, got out of his Bayside, N. Y. apartment three months early, he offered an excuse-complaint not new to landlords-a plague of insects. Last fortnight in Flushing's Municipal Court, Musician Fox's suing landlords submitted this letter which they had sent him: "The insects you complained of are crickets and no doubt are found in most of the homes and apartments of Bayside. They are harmless, and many people enjoy their chirping; in fact, there was a poem [sic] dedicated to 'The Cricket on the Hearth...
...organization. Conductor Leginska will pack up her spare frock-coat then. Violinist Eileen Mayo will abandon the schooner aboard which she lives. Horn-playing Suzanne Howitt will leave the women's club of Teaneck, N. J. Eight other ladies will shoulder their double-basses, pretty Doris Smith her colossal tuba...
Most people know about the Mills Brothers now because they perform over the radio twice a week for Vapex. They sing in trick quartet fashion and when it pleases them they can simulate perfectly a tuba, a trumpet and a pair of saxophones. Their voices, unaided, are too small for vaudeville. But they use their radio technique, huddle around an amplifier-microphone...