Sunday, April 20, 2008

Tubby the Tuba

So this last weekend I played trombone with the Eastern Iowa Brass Band.  Along with quite a few original pieces we also did some arrangements and transciptions of various pieces.  One of the pieces we played was an arrangement of Tubby the Tuba. The story was written by Paul Tripp and the music was written by George Kleinsinger. The tuba solo was played by John Manning and Narrated by Bob Gibbs  The story is of a tuba, Tubby, who never gets the melody and is always playing um-pa's, when he tries to play the melody, the orchestra ridicules him and makes him feel ashamed. After the rehearsal, Tubby is walking down by a river and this frog come and cheers Tubby up and teaches him a song. Tubby takes the song back to his orchestra and ends up playing for the orchestra and in the end everyone loves him. 

I found on youtube a cartoon from 1947 of the original version. Click here for that version.

One of things I noticed was where all the non-brass solo's in the original went to in a brass band:
Piccolo- 1st Eb cornet soloist
bass clarinet (frog)- bass trombone with a bucket mute.

After  hearing the original I thought that the arranger of the Brass Band arrangement did a really nice job bringing over all the different colors that was part of the larger orchestra.

1 comment:

La Pichardo said...

¿Do you remember who is the publisher of the arrangement yo played?