100 Tubas Give Braxton's Rare Piece Its Third-Ever Performance — SkimNews
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- Anthony Braxton's Composition No. 19 (for 100 Tubas), written in 1971, will be performed for only the third time ever on 19 September at Amisfield Walled Garden near Haddington as part of the Lammermuir festival; the source states it has never previously been staged outside the US.
- The score is divided into four sections for four separate bands of 25 tuba players each, with Braxton introducing it in a written essay as "alternative parade music" that allows individual players increasing improvisational freedom as the performance progresses.
- Marco Blaauw, trumpeter with Ensemble Musikfabrik in Germany, proposed the piece after testing the garden's acoustics in December and helped plan the repertoire; the venue's 20-foot walls create what the organisers describe as a natural echo chamber.
- The piece sat unperformed for 35 years until tubist Jay Rozen joined Braxton's sextet in 2006 and, having seen the score published in an experimental music magazine in the 1970s, asked the composer to reconstruct the written music for its New York premiere that year.
- John Wallace, former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the trumpeter who performed alongside Kiri Te Kanawa at the 1981 royal wedding, died earlier in 2025; the festival is dedicated to his memory after he danced to Blaauw's improvisations during the December acoustic visit.
- Tuba players from the US, Latvia, Estonia and the rest of the UK are travelling to East Lothian with instruments including orchestral tubas, over-the-shoulder sousaphones, tenor horns, euphoniums and the rarely sighted Wagner tuba.
- By the end of the performance the structure dissolves into a mass group improvisation, with the 100 players having paraded around the garden in multiple formations and converging in the centre as the autumnal light fades.
Why it matters: A 54-year-old experimental composition requiring 100 tuba players has now been performed only three times, all but once in New York; staging it inside a 20-foot-walled Scottish garden turns the venue itself into the instrument's resonant chamber, giving the European premiere a scale and acoustic setting the work has never previously encountered.
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