I’m sorry I’ve been mean to the euphonium
I was in a restaurant a few months ago eating by myself, looking at my phone while I ate. At the table next to me sat two middle aged men who seemed to be friends that hadn’t seen each other in a while. I wasn’t paying much attention until I heard the word “euphonium”. Paraphrased as I remember it:
Man 1 (about his son): He loves it! I had never heard of it before, but he plays it all the time.
Man 2: What’s it called?
1: Euphonium. It’s like a little tuba, but also kind of like a trombone with buttons.
2: Huh.
1: (smiling…obviously proud) Yup. He plays it in the marching band and in the concert band. He made first chair last year and is in the region band. I’m taking him to some sort of competition or something next week. It’s really nice seeing him take to something. He hasn’t really been interested in anything since he was little, and he’s really running with this. He’s even talking about some sort of summer marching band thing with it…And there’s a whole little crew of them that like band as much as he does, so he’s got this pretty tight knit group of kids who seem really nice. It’s really changed him…
Biases are strange. They clearly modulate how we interact with our world, yet they do so usually without our being aware they exist. Growing up as an arrogant little, ahem, brass player, I had biases about the euphonium that I need to come clean about.
The euphonium occupies some strange real estate in the brass community. It’s stature in the British brass band world is unquestioned. It also plays an important role in wind bands, where, in more difficult rep, the players are required remarkable technical and expressive capabilities to do parts justice. An inadequate euphonium player can do wonders to junk up a wind band brass section. This paradigm is what drives band programs around the country to recruit and cultivate young players. In this way, the euphonium isn’t different than any other band instrument.
In fact, because of the big mouthpiece, easy fingerings, and conical bore timbre, the euphonium offers a really comfortable on-ramp for many students. Compared to instruments like the flute or trumpet, most euphonium students can get a characteristic sound quite early in study. I’ve known many young students who struggled with other instruments in early trial periods who found a happy home with the euphonium. I even played it for my 8th grade year in band when I got braces and wasn’t able to play the trumpet comfortably.
My bias shows when considering the chasm between the number of students being taught the euphonium and the number of professionals being paid for it.
Although I imagine an enterprising DMA student somewhere has data on this, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that there are dozens of thousands of high school euphonium students in the US. Of those, maybe 500 continue each year to hone their craft at the collegiate level (if anyone has actual numbers about this, please correct me!). And the same DMA dissertation can also confirm how many jobs exist in the US where playing the euphonium is the primary feature. I’ll guess there’s not many. Maybe 25? And this isn’t 25 per year. 25 total. This puts these job numbers in the same category as the NBA. And the level required to get one of these jobs is a reflection of the mastery and fluency at the top of this food chain (this guy is pretty amazing…so is this guy).
My college-aged cynicism saw music learning through a sort of vocational lens, assigning merit to music study likely to be rewarded by the artistic economy. In this reductionist view, practicality trumps most anything else. Why learn the euphonium when no one will ever pay you money to play the euphonium?
This view isn’t just wrong, it’s also sad.
It is statistically unlikely any young euphonium student will grow up to be a professional. Even in comparison to her fellow band mates whose chances of being professional wind/brass/percussionists is already laughably small, the euphonium player stands out as the student least likely to get paid to play. But that is a dark take on another possibility: the euphonium player stands out as the student most likely to learn the instrument for the sake of learning the instrument.
Perhaps young players account for the unlikely outcome of a euphonium career. Maybe it frees them up to see music study as not needing to lead to anything more than enjoying learning and making music with and for other people. This sounds lovely! Maybe the euphonium students are the ones I should have been paying attention to more closely. Maybe they had something figured out that has taken me a few decades of professional work to discover: music learning doesn’t need to be aimed at a job.
The euphonium carries the exact same potential as any other instrument in any music room (except you, Eb soprano cornet…you are good to no one) to afford a student and family an elevated sense of humanity. With effective, thoughtful teachers modeling joy and community in music-making, every instrument has the capacity to make a student feel successful, expressive, and human. That dad was so proud of his son because his son had found an instrument that made him love learning music. The euphonium made that possible. I’m sorry I’ve been mean to the euphonium.
