100 Tubas to Stage Rare Braxton Piece Outside US — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Lammermuir festival will stage Anthony Braxton's Composition No. 19 (for 100 Tubas) with 100 tuba players at Amisfield Walled Garden near Haddington, East Lothian, on 19 September, marking the piece's first performance outside the US and only its third ever.
- Anthony Braxton described the 1971 work as "alternative parade music"; it consists of four sections for four separate bands of 25 tuba players each, with structured notation that opens increasing space for individual improvisation until the piece ends as a wild group improvisation gathered in the garden's center at dusk.
- John Harris, artistic director of Red Note Ensemble, organized the event after festival artistic director James Waters challenged him to "fill the garden with sound"; tuba players from the US, Latvia, Estonia, and elsewhere in the UK confirmed they would travel to participate.
- Marco Blaauw, trumpeter with Ensemble Musikfabrik, identified the Braxton piece during a December acoustic visit to the garden alongside John Wallace, former Royal Conservatoire of Scotland principal who performed at Charles and Diana's wedding; Wallace died earlier this year, and this year's Lammermuir festival is dedicated to his memory.
- Composition No. 19 was originally written without a performance in mind; the score was published in an experimental music magazine in the 1970s, and its New York premiere in 2006 came only after tubist Jay Rozen joined Braxton's sextet and asked the composer to reconstruct the written music.
- Amisfield Walled Garden, originally the kitchen garden for a vanished stately home, is maintained by committed volunteers and features 20-foot-high castle-like walls that Harris says make the space function like an echo chamber, with every note "ricocheting around like an echo off a mountainside."
Why it matters: This event marks the first time Braxton's 1971 tuba composition will be heard outside the US — and the work's structure, which dissolves into collective improvisation, makes the gathering itself the artistic statement rather than a passive concert. The festival's dedication to John Wallace, who danced in that garden last December, transforms the occasion into a memorial for a trumpeter whose career bridged royal performances and contemporary experimental music.
Ask SkimNews
