Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 25, 1990 TAG: 9005250258
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY CAMPBELL ASSICIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BLOOMINGTON, IND. LENGTH: Medium
Not for nothing was he dubbed "Mr. Tuba U.S.A." by no less a personage than the late conductor Leopold Stokowski.
How has he lived up to his tubriquet?
In 1960 there was only one full-time tuba professor in the U.S. Today there are more than 90. The best known and one of the finest players is Phillips himself at Indiana University.
When the tuba position becomes vacant in an orchestra today, 150 tubists may apply for the chair, Phillips says, and 100 would be suitable, 50 would be superb and two or three would be truly great artists.
With Phillips as an inspiration, tuba festivals have been booming nationwide.
For 40 years, he has been pursuing composers whose work he likes. "What kind of career would Heifitz have had if he'd only had funny tunes to play on the fiddle?
"Composers' business is organizing sound. When they hear a new sound, they get excited. I never, to this day, have been rejected by a composer.
"The composer is absolutely our best friend."
The tuba was invented in 1835 but no composer made it a star until 1954 when Ralph Vaughan Williams' tuba concerto was commissioned by the London Symphony. Now there are hundreds of compositions for tuba.
Phillips teaches, promotes, inspires, organizes and administers well enough that nine colleges or universities have offered him their presidencies in the last 10 years. He refuses, he says, because it would cut down on everything else he does.
And Phillips likes the 104-acre Tubaranch outside Bloomington to be the home that his and wife Carol's three grown sons can come back to.
Phillips' love affair with the tuba began via the wrap-around Sousaphone, which plays the same music. When he was 13, in 1942, in Marionville, Mo., Phillips inherited the school-owned Sousaphone. He bicycled to band practice wearing the instrument. "If the wind was behind me, I didn't have to pedal."
Two years later, bandmaster Homer Lee, a retired circus bandmaster, found Phillips a used tuba to buy for $60 and recommended that the King Brothers Circus hire him for the summer.
His first year with the circus, Phillips says, they played 187 titles. They'd play Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" introducing the trapeze artists, ascending-scale music as they climbed up, fast gallops to get them down, "12th Street Rag," signaling the clowns to distract if a high-wire act fell.
"When I came to New York for a free-lance career, I wasn't afraid of any kind of music."
Later, Phillips joined the Ringling Brothers Band. The New York Philharmonic's great tubist, William Bell, sat in at Madison Square Garden. In 1950 Bell got Phillips a four-year scholarship at the Juilliard School. "I became aware, fairly early on after I got to Juilliard that my instrument was a second-class citizen among the other instruments. I never felt that with the circus."
One evening, walking to his Juilliard practice room, Phillips heard piano, violin and flute students playing Chopin, Mendelssohn, Handel, Mozart. He took out his music. "Solo Bombasto." "Asleep in the Deep." "Locked in the Cradle of the Deep." "Jig Elephantine."
"The next morning I asked [professor] Vincent Persichetti if I could see him. I poured my heart out about the tuba literature. He said, `First, all the music ever written belongs to you as much as it belongs to anybody else. If you like a Bach flute sonata or Mozart horn sonata, take it, play it.' Then he got a little sarcastic and said, `You want better music for your instrument? Do you think a violinist is going to do something about it? You'll have to do something about it.'
In selling the tuba as a serious instrument, Phillips says, "You may have to do something that seems off the wall."
In 1975, he inaugurated Octubafest. Octubafests now are held on more than 100 American campuses.
Octubafest, held in Octuba, of course, didn't begin as a clever pun. Phillips decided on a week of early-in-the-semester recitals by his tuba students at Indiana University. He was going to call it October Tuba Festival. "Then it jumped at me. Octubafest."
Phillips also started Tuba Santas and Tuba Christmas, which became annual. Tuba Christmas, free concerts by large tuba choirs in more than 100 cities worldwide, began at New York's Rockefeller Center in 1974 to honor the New York Philharmonic's William Bell on his Christmas birthday.
He says, "The audience might come to those massive concerts because they're amused at 500 tubas but `Silent Night' is taken seriously."
by CNB