Scales

It doesn't matter if they're in triplets, sixteenth notes, quarters or good ol' solo and ensemble style. I hate scales. I'm nearly 24 years old and have only recently understood how they are valuable to me. Ostensibly, they seem useless to a tuba player. Most band and orchestra music for tuba players is moderately challenging at best; that is, in terms of fast passages (with the possible exception of circus marches). "Hard" music in large ensemble settings is often playing the range of the instrument in a short amount of time (Berlioz loves this), masking breaths, playing lower and louder. Knowing this, scales seem like stretching your legs for exercise even though you're confined to a wheel chair. It may seem extreme, but you get the idea.

But something has changed my mind. It's solo music. While a lot of tuba music is hardly tonal or scalar, it can be fast, scatter brained, and precise. Playing scales provides a deftness to fingers that is otherwise not demanded of me in the ensemble music that I play. Still, what I struggle with is legitimizing it to students, especially beginners. Ultimately it will help them should they continue to play music long into their future. But what if they really don't care? And often enough, this is the case. Or even more often a student thinks that a scale means Bb to Bb and back. Changing that mindset is both annoying and makes me wonder what some music teachers are actually doing in their classrooms. As much as I find value in them, it still isn't that much fun. It's tedious, sometimes soul-destroying work. Or at least that's what it feels like to me most of the time. But my reward is what I get when playing tuba rep. What's the reward for an 11 or 12 year old?