How Rochester Tuba Christmas became a low-brass holiday highlight 

[
      {
        "name": "500x250 Ad",
        "insertPoint": "5",
        "component": "15667920",
        "parentWrapperClass": "",
        "requiredCountToDisplay": "1"
      }
    ]

There’s an old joke among tuba players that goes like this: Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from the tuba recital.

That may be for chickens, but if history is any guide, a couple thousand people will flock to Eastman Theatre’s Kodak Hall on Dec. 12 for the jolly, tongue-in-cheek tradition of Rochester Tuba Christmas.

The free annual concert is so popular that it regularly “sells out” of the available 2,365 tickets within a few hours.

The appeal of the event, performers and regular concertgoers say, is in the combination of the spectacle and familiarity of scores of tuba and euphonium players crammed onto a single stage belting out more than 20 beloved Christmas carols.
“I think that's why it works, because these are tunes that people know,” says the concert’s director Jeremy Stoner. “They're hearing it in a new way, and they're seeing something crazy in front of them, but they know the melody.”

A brigade of low brass instruments, some of them wrapped in tinsel and lights, oom-pah-pah-ing their way through “Jingle Bells” is bizarrely soothing. Ploomp-ploom-ploomp. Ploomp-ploom-ploomp. Ploomp-ploomp-ploom-ploomp-ploomp.


The first ploomp of Tuba Christmas reverberated in Rochester in 1982, but the origins of the event date to 1974, when celebrated tubist Harvey Phillips assembled 500 tuba players for a Christmas concert near the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza Ice Rink in New York City.

“Primarily, I wanted to demonstrate to the general public that the tuba is a very noble instrument,” Phillips told The New York Times that year. “You have to do something to get people’s attention.”

When he died in 2010, The Times wrote of his legacy: “Most tuba players agree that if their unwieldly instrument has shed any of the bad associations that have clung to it — orchestral clown, herald of grim news, poorly respected back-bencher best when not noticed, good for little more than the ‘oom’ in the oom-pah-pah — it is largely thanks to Mr. Phillips. He waged a lifelong campaign to improve the tuba’s image.”

Attention, Phillips got. Volunteers in 206 cities around the country today hold Tuba Christmas extravaganzas under the auspices of the Harvey Phillips Foundation.

Notably, Alec Wilder, a Rochester-born composer and Eastman School of Music professor, created the four-part musical arrangements for the carols at the inaugural concert in New York City that are still used today.

For more than a decade, Rochester Tuba Christmas has been directed by Stoner, who played in his first Tuba Christmas when he was 9 years old. He had just started learning the tuba, but had a professional euphonium player in his stepfather Glenn K. Call (the long-time conductor of Rochester Tuba Christmas), and the concert then was organized by one of Call’s students, Joe Baker.

By the time Stoner was lending his first oom-pahs to the yuletide event, it had become a staple of the Christmas experience at Midtown Plaza. Rochester families could ride the monorail, take the kids to see Santa Claus, and listen to Tuba Christmas as they shopped.

“It's just such a unique sight and a unique sound,” Stoner says. “Yeah, people would line the balconies around the plaza, the mall in there, and look down and it was just a thing.”

Eve Elzenga, a former librarian and fashion writer who attended the very first Tuba Christmas and attends every year that she can snag tickets, remembers the crowds of people on the balconies and staircase of the plaza and “the big, bouncy acoustics” of the room reverberating with the joyful sounds of low brass.

“It's so big and bright and brassy,” Elzenga says. “It's inspiring, you know? And it makes you feel like you’re a kid again, that you're at some very special gathering.”
Enthusiasm for the oomphatic event is shared as much by the audience as its performers, which has for many years at various Tuba Christmas concerts around the country included euphonium and sousaphone players.

Stoner recalls as many as 286 musicians participating in a single event at Eastman Theatre, some of them forced to perform their parts backstage. Since then, the number of performers has been capped at 200. This year, amid the pandemic which last year canceled the concert, is limited to 100 players.

Tuba Christmas musicians get one hour to practice together before the roughly 45-minute concert. Stoner says that while he aims to get the most musicality out of his enormous ensemble, the dynamics observed during rehearsal usually fall by the wayside during the performance, due to the excitement of the players.


The sheer loudness of the instruments often belies their pleasant sound.

“It’s a low, beautiful, melodious, sonorous instrument,” says Patty Welch, a tuba player and band director for West Irondequoit public schools. “And you would be surprised how gorgeous it can really sound.”

Welch has participated in Rochester Tuba Christmas since 1985. The concert is a great way to strengthen the bond between teacher and student, she says.

“I have a lot of clarinet and trumpet playing friends and colleagues that are band directors in the area,” Welch says. “But for that day, everybody is a tuba or euphonium player. And they come with their young kids and they make sure that they have a great time, and everybody plays Christmas carols together — and it really is just a wonderful tradition in Rochester.”
Welch also pointed out that while the concert enables low-brass players of all skill levels to perform, it also provides young students the chance to continue to play a melody — an uncommon role for such instruments — at their schools and for their families.

But aspiring kids aren’t the only ones getting in on the action. Rochester Tuba Christmas concerts include players ranging in age from 9 to 90. The experience of hearing a more accomplished musician play can be an ear-opening experience for a child, Welch says.

“That might be their first shot of really listening to somebody with really warm, wonderful tone quality, or technique or range,” she says. “And they're suddenly like, ‘Ok, my world was only this big. But now it's this big. And I understand there's so much more possibility with what I could do when I play.’”
And unlike most concerts in Kodak Hall, audience members are encouraged to sing along, which Welch says emphasizes the long-standing importance of the event in the community.

“When you're all in there together, singing Christmas carols at this wonderful time of year, and you're seeing so many brightly colored, decorated instruments, and so many people having fun,” Welch says, “it's just all feel-goods, like the whole time you're in there.”

Rochester Tuba Christmas takes place on Sunday, Dec. 12, at 3 p.m., at Eastman Theatre's Kodak Hall, 60 Gibbs St. Free. Proof of vaccination required for ages 12 and up. Children under 12 may attend with a vaccinated adult. Masks are required. Tickets are available at esm.rochester.edu. The concert is also available via livestream at esm.rochester.edu/live/kodak.

Daniel J. Kushner is CITY’s arts editor. He can be reached at [email protected].