Practice, h’mm that’s an interesting idea but like (I suspect) a lot of other players I really wonder where it will lead to? I tend to find that I have a fairly stable underlying foundation of skills which doesn’t seem to move forward much for practice and that whilst practice does help with immediate problems the resulting enhanced skills quickly ebb away. Yes, that is quite a negative perspective but I doubt that it’s uncommon. Let’s explore the concepts further.
Not much is asked of a Tuba in a Brass Band and my Band has better Tuba players than me so any ‘glory’ can be quickly pushed to one side - such things don’t appeal to me anyway - so I can just play music for pleasure and with rare exception I play something for pleasure each day. Music can be made on many instruments, could be something different in the Band or not a Band instrument at all. In ‘my’ Band many of the players play other instruments too (eg. Piano, guitar, recorder, clarinet) so why not join such people by giving something else a try? It certainly broadens your musical experience and like ‘cross training’ it feeds back (positively) into how well you play in Band.
I’m hoping to still be playing in my 90’s but understand that at some point I’ll be too old to play Tuba, etc, - but whatever my current age is I’m always looking for another twenty years of Banding. To my mind I really think it’s best to play something musical until either your body or your mind fails you. Of course that doesn’t have to mean still belonging to a Band or (dependant on attitudes within the Band) doing every rehearsal and job. A Band not too far away from me has a group of oldies who meet up to just play and similar informal groups aren’t that uncommon. The U.K’s. University of the Third Age is a wonderful organisation, branch activities vary but recorder and ukulele groups are common and they keep folk socially and musically active, there can be musical life after banding. I randomly select a branch of U3A to illustrate the music available within it:
Bromsgrove U3A .
Well that’s it from me other than to wish that there was more unaccompanied music available to play. Having said that by chance I found that the Recorder has a lot of ancient music written for it and the pitch range is within that of Brass Instruments - I must explore that idea further. The likes of Arban bore me silly but give me a tune to play and I’ll be blowing (and casually learning too) for literally hours.
