TubaForum.net

I NEVER trust myself playing this rhythm - particularly not after not having encountered it in a piece or etude/practice session for several weeks.

When hearing a great many (though not the superb ones, to be sure) community bands play transcriptions of Ride of the Valkuries, those who've played it with orchestras (and/or as a test piece for orchestra position auditions) smile just a bit - and keep their comments to themselves, as it's so very common for the 16th note to "slide" back into the first half of the beat, and the last eighth note (which is supposed to not begin until the last 1/3 of the beat) to begin precisely/incorrectly on the beginning of the second half of the beat, rather than where it belongs.

Ride of the Valkuries is required on every tuba audition, but is rarely programmed. (I've probably only performed it four of five times, myself.)

I never practice playing it (nor etudes such as this one - nor a particular Bach cello dance suite movement) with the metronome ONLY clicking on the beats, but will set the metronome at DOUBLE speed, with the clicks occurring BOTH on the beats AND at the beginnings of the 16th notes - WHICH KEEPS ME HONEST.

A jaw-droppingly perfect execution of this repeated rhythm (to "get it in one's mind's ear") is found on the old DGG recording of Berlin/von Karajan (recorded c. 1962) performing Beethoven 7.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo

I should look up Ride sometime, so that I can do an audition.

A community band I dropped out of this year did Ride recently. I didn't hear the concert but did hear that the tubas had great fun with the part. (I was playing horn, anyway, in that group.)

If B-flat minor and major, that would really be fun, and if only in the original.
I had some half step extension junk that I rigged up to fit my model 5450 C tuba, which allowed me to play that piece in the open key, and it was fun.

A few thoughts.

1. I think we overthink Ride a lot. A. LOT. Along with most of our other excerpts. And in general, the overthinking leads to overcomplication which leads to always flubbing the rhythm.
2. Related to #1, and this applies to almost every discipline I've ever encountered. The easiest example I can think of is golf. You (general "you;" I would never accuse YOU of a bad golf shot) take out your driver, and you hook your first shot to the left. So you set back up, and invariably, trying to avoid hooking, you slice it to the right. Because you were thinking "hit it more right" instead of "hit it dead center." With Ride, that ends up with people not being able to place the sixteenth note, because they're always trying to play it "not wrong" instead of "right."
3. This is one of those slightly complex rhythms that (to me) is better conceptualized and practiced with the macro beats in mind. Again *for me* having the metronome set to the dotted quarter notes keeps me more honest. If I think of the sixteenth and eighth notes as leading to the dotted eighth, I can't really get that far off. And even if I'm slightly off rhythmically (which I would never admit to), it still works musically, because it's still driving where it needs to go.

That's good advice, but I was really talking more about the rhythmic figure itself then that one Wagner excerpt that is usually in the preliminary round of tuba auditions.

I guess it was noted that I demonstrated some people (who may well all be dead today) executing the rhythm really well in a Beethoven symphony, and not on some super-duper master degree tuba student's professional tuba player Facebook page (doing all of us smelly/sweaty tuba players an enormous favor by showing all of us how it is supposed to be done).

It's just really easy to play the 16th note way too early, because when it's played where it is supposed to be played, the final third of the beat has to come quite quickly as well, and playing the 16th note early is a way to cheat. The only problem with cheating at anything is that it sucks.