While exchanging emails with a fellow-music history buff this week, I was introduced to a rather striking tuba that I had never seen before. It is the King Rotary Valve Symphony Model Orchestra Bass (No. 1280). It was apparently introduced by H. N. White in 1934, and it seems to have been discontinued a mere five years later, in 1939 (at least I could no longer find any listing for it in that year, or any year after). Here's the promotional page for this unique instrument from White Way News No. 7 (1934), and pulled from Mark Overton's fabulous online museum at Saxophone.org: As you can ..read more

  I recently discovered that Ancestry.com now has a photo colorizing feature, and I had to try it out on Conrad. He's looking pretty sharp in 1898 above, with Conn's first Sousaphone. And here is his portrait with Sousa's Band a few years earlier ..read more

While at a leadership development conference in Atlanta this week, we had some time to kill before our flight home, so we checked out the College Football Hall of Fame. It was a pretty cool place, featuring not only a lot of USC stuff (see below), but also some Sousaphones that brought a wry smile to my face! In the small marching band exhibit, there were only two instruments displayed in the case - a trombone, held by a mannequin sporting a Morehouse College band uniform, and an Ohio State University Sousaphone, seen above, alongside a portion of a video montage showing a Stanford tuba playe ..read more

My family visited Boston for the first time this summer, and that encouraged me to poke around to see what I could learn about the National Peace Jubilee, held in Boston on June 15-19, 1869. This massive event was conceived and led by the great bandmaster P. S. Gilmore, who, two years later, wrote a massive history of it (758 pages!). Here's the cover page (the entire book is available online courtesy of the HathiTrust): Gilmore wasn't initially planning to write this history, but the Executive Committee had hoped that someone would, and so he eventually took it up - reluctantly. Here are h ..read more

  Since I started digging into the history of the tuba 10 years ago, I have realized more than once that the work of the historian is never done. That is, I'm always making discoveries that add more to the story, which is exactly what happened this week. In 2019, I published my research on the Harvard Tuba (click here to see the video version of my article), which was built in 1889, and I was pleased with how much of its story I was able to tell. But then I visited that historic horn at Harvard a few weeks ago, and that prompted me to poke around a bit more to see what else I could lear ..read more

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When my family decided to vacation up at Acadia National Park this past week, we tacked on a brief visit to Boston, since we had never been to that great city before, and it was basically on the way to Maine. For me, that meant dropping in on the Harvard Tuba in its native environment! Through the gracious hospitality of Michael Ruderman (shown with me above), we were not only given access to see this monstrous beast, which had been the subject of my research and writing a few years ago (click here for all of that), but Michael also gave us an insider's tour of the heart of Harvard University ..read more

One of my favorite tuba-related stories is very personal, and goes back eleven years. I was surprised to discover that I hadn't blogged on it before, but then it dawned on me: this was before I stumbled upon the hobby of researching the history of the Sousaphone! So, finally, here's the story . . . As a seventh grader, in late November 2011, my son, Jonathan, expressed interest in seeing what it was like to play a Sousaphone. He mentioned that he saw some old Sousaphone pieces high up on a shelf in the instrument storage room at his middle school, where he was playing tuba in the band. So he ..read more

The September 1, 1906 edition of the New York Tribune Having recently been given a Conn tuba built in 1899, with both "Elkhart" and "New York" engraved on the bell, I decided to see what I could learn about the years when Conn had a branch store in New York City. I first became aware of this period a few years ago, when I read Margaret Downie Banks' 1994 work, Elkhart's Brass Roots, where she confirmed that Conn put his efforts into establishing a retail store in New York City (October 1897) for the sale of his Wonder line of instruments, as well as his inventory of fi ..read more

In the December 11, 1897 edition of The Music Trade Review, the following front page notice appears: What exactly was that "immense big tuba or helicon in the window" that a uniformed bandsman was "manipulating"? I'm guessing it was this, or something like this: Here's additional information later on in that same edition of The Review (p. 27): Notice that it says, "In the window, at present, is a monster brass Helicon with a forty inch bell and weighing sixty-three pounds." That about matches what we can see in the photo above! And here are photographs of the Conn facility at 23 ..read more