Melvyn Poore

He spent a lot of time developing his own solo repertoire and techniques. “Not entirely new techniques, because they’d all been used before on other instruments. Things like using reeds instead of a mouthpiece. Taking the instrument apart. Different kinds of mutes. Circular breathing. Using the voice at the same time as playing.

The things I was trying to play seemed to require, for example, continuous sound, so I developed circular breathing. Some required extremes of pitch, so I had to think about getting higher notes than you can obtain with a regular mouthpiece. You can use falsetto voice, or reeds. Reeds mean you have to break to change mouthpieces and you have to sacrifice some of your control over pitch — the instrument just doesn’t behave in the same way. With voice there’s no gap, but there’s not much power either.

I use both single (a tenor saxophone mouthpiece) and double (bassoon) reeds. On the saxophone mouthpiece in the low register you get something that doesn’t sound like a reed at all — it’s more like flutter tonguing a pedal note. The middle range sounds rather like a saxophone, but less grainy. In the upper register you can do all your squeaks and glissandi.”

After university he worked at Birmingham Arts Lab. for four years, on electronic music (building up the equipment from scratch), a new music workshop, organising concerts and a music publishing venture.

His interest in music theatre (by which he means neither opera nor drama with songs, but pieces in which music and theatrical action work hand in hand) grew. In 1978 he commissioned Tuba Mirum from Trevor Wishart, and this is now one of his most requested performances.

Lasting about 20 minutes, it is set in the basement of a psychiatric hospital. The central figure, played by Melvyn, is there as a political prisoner.

“I’m brought onto the stage by two bureaucrats and a surgeon, who put me into a bed, then sit at a desk which should ideally be fairly high up. They switch on a red light and sit there for most of the rest of the action looking through files and papers.”

They are his judges. Politically and medically they are deciding what to do with him, and on the level of the mass for the dead, from which the piece’s title is drawn, they suggest the Trinity looking through the Book of Judgement in which all is written, preparatory to the sounding of the Last Trumpet, or Tuba Mirum.

“I get out of bed and cross to a big box which has something leaning on it covered in a sack. I reveal the tuba, which has three motor klaxons attached to it and, on the side of the mouth pipe, a little rack with a duck caller, a train whistle, a toy trumpet, a siren and a cuckoo call.

When I begin to play it’s full of water so we just get bubbling sounds. I empty it and go through various other non-normal tuba sounds.

When I actually play for the first time we hear a motive from the tuba mirum plainsong which develops through the piece:

I’m always trying to play this motive, but I’m always looking over my shoulder to see if I’m being watched and I use a series of ever more bizarre mutes to disguise it: one with a tambourine inside which rattles when I play in certain registers; one of black felt with red tassels which has an alarm bell inside it which rings at a climatic point. (This and other things are controlled by foot pedals which make the piece even more difficult to play!)

When the bell rings I take out the slides of the instrument to find out where the noise is coming from. I also switch to a bassoon reed and a section follows in which the sounds have nothing to do with normal tuba sound at all. This ends with an explosion inside the bell and clouds of smoke through which lights shine.

The final mute is the cornucopia — the horn of plenty with all the fruit. Things are quite happy now. I cast all care to the winds and play the motive, which develops into a big tune. The tuba mirum — the wonderful tuba, as we might punningly call it — plays its last trick. By means of a loudspeaker hidden inside the mute, it replicates its own sound several times. Animal sounds are heard on tape, starting with low growls and grunts, but finally turning to birdsong — a symbol of freedom.

The other three have now decided what to do with me. They take the instrument from me and lead me towards the bed. There is a blackout.

When the lights come back up there’s a single spotlight on the tuba and one on me, sitting in bed totally drugged. The tuba, on its own, repeats two sounds from earlier in the piece: the bubbling sound and one rather like a dog whining. Then there’s the final blackout.”

Another piece from his repertoire is Tom Johnson’s “Monologue” in which he both plays the tuba and speaks to it. It’s “very humorous and not that easy to play. I like it because it lightens up a programme. I like to be entertaining as well as serious”

When I asked him what sort of living he made out of his work, he replied dryly, “A very precarious one. But in many ways it’s not a lot worse than any other free-lance musician. The problem is that, although the market is there, you have to do a lot more work to seek it out, at least initially.”

As well as his solo work, he plays with the European Tuba Quartet, which plays improvisation based music, the Grubenklang Orchester (“basically a jazz band but playing in a great variety of styles”) and the Interface Europe Quartet which plays very melodic jazz. “I have to cover a lot of miles. The jazz gigs get fixed two to three months in advance. The new music ones are fixed much further in advance. When there’s a clash we manage somehow.

I suppose I do between 50 and 60 gigs in a year.”

Talking to Melvin Poore, one can begin to accept the idea of a tuba as the symbol of mankind’s longing for freedom. That seems something of an achievement.