How and why I became a musician

Edouard Gros has had a remarkable career in Switzerland playing double bass and tuba. (His reputation as a tuba player was exceptional.) In BB50 he started to tell us about his beginnings. Here he enters the profession.

In 1921 I was eleven years old. From being a brilliant pupil in the early classes of primary school I suddenly became bad enough, and unbearable enough, for the secondary school headmaster to write in my annual report: ‘‘A lazy and dissolute pupil! Will eventually exhaust his teachers’ patience!’’ So a paternal outburst was imminent and it was no doubt in an attempt to bring me back to the straight and narrow that he made me join the Boy Scouts.

You may well wonder what belonging to the Boy Scouts has to do with becoming a musician. Well, unlikely as it may seem, it is thanks to them that I became a double-bass player rather than a cellist or a pianist — or a civil servant — and this is how it happened. One a year the Scout leader organised an evening’s entertainment. This consisted of interminable bad sketches and, to play while the curtain went up and during the intervals, he had started a little orchestra where he himself was the pianist and which, of course, had no double bass. Remember that in those days even modest families got their offspring to learn the piano, the violin, the cello, occasionally some other instrument but never — God forbid! — the double bass. And that is why, without asking me, the conductor in question knocked on our door one day and said to my father without further ado, ‘‘It would be marvellous if you could give your son some lessons. Just a few, just so that he can manage the bass part in our little orchestra.’’ Of course, like ignoramuses who think they are funny, he thought that bass playing amounted to no more than plonk, plonk, plonk. Dad, who was no fool and was getting worried about the future of his no-good son, finally agreed with good grace, telling himself that I would soon lose interest and there would be no future in it. He went straight out to look for a small instrument, took the spike off and — E, A, D, G — there we were. First position, F♯, B, E, A. That’s how I started, perched on my stool from the word go.