‘Masculine’ tuba tamed by female student

 

Six months in, Ember Evans was not exactly blowing people away with her trumpet playing.

“Not so great,” she admitted.

So her teacher suggested a change.

“She handed me a tuba.”

That was in sixth grade, and Evans has been playing the bulky instrument since. Now a sophomore in music education at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, she is the only female tuba player at the University.

“It’s obvious she loves music and loves playing her instrument,” said Kenyon Wilson, associate head of the Department of Music and conductor of the UTC Wind Ensemble, one of the bands in which Evans is a member.

“She comes prepared, always has her stuff. She’s the one that’s disappointed if something happens and we can’t have rehearsal.”

The Wind Ensemble is one of five instrumental groups that Evans is in at UTC. She practices several times a day if she gets the chance between classes, she said, but that can be tough since she’s carrying a full course load.

Apparently believing she has too much downtime, she’s also singing in the Woman’s Chorale.

But it’s not all music all the time, she insisted. She gets to walk Ruger, her Labrador retriever, for non-tuba fun and excitedly shows a photo of him on her iPhone.

Growing up in Maryville, Tennessee, Evans said female tuba players were not unusual. There were four in the Blount County Honors Band, but she was the only one at Alcoa High School, where she graduated. The four bonded as a group.

” I’m still in contact with them. They’re still my friends,” Evans said.

To play tuba—at least well—doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female. Everyone must strengthen the abdominal muscles, get the lungs in shape and learn the proper use of the embouchure—lips, facial muscles, tongue and teeth.

“It definitely takes a lot of discipline. If you don’t practice, you can lose your skills pretty quickly,” Evans explained.

But there’s more to it than just being able to push air through the imposing instrument.

“I think it’s one of those instruments that, when you play, you have to fit emotion into it or it’s going to sound very robotic,” she said. “It’s the kind of instrument that you have to really focus on how you want to express the music.”

Being a female playing the tuba, it’s pretty much a given that she endured some teasing, but Evans said the culprits aren’t who you might think.

“To tell you the truth, I got more teasing about playing a ‘masculine’ instrument from fellow tuba players,” she said. “They’re like, ‘Oh, you play tuba? Don’t you think that’s a little too heavy for you?’ or ‘Don’t you think that’s more of a man’s instrument?'”

Some even say that she’s not as proficient on the instrument because she’s female. In response, she notes that she’s usually has been in a higher “chair”—considered better than the next “chair” down—than those teasing her.

“They just get so red in the face,” she said.

Beth Chouinard-Mitchell, who is playing a concert tonight at UTC with fellow tubist Avital Handler, experienced much the same thing when she first started playing tuba in eighth grade.

“I didn’t really care what people thought,” she said. “I just did my own thing, and I was very good right away, so that kind of squelched any comments because I was much better than all of the other guys around me.”

She refers to soccer player Mia Hamm, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time World Cup champion. A coach once told Hamm that she played like a girl.

“She said, ‘Well, if you ran faster, you could, too.’ And I like that. I like that very much,” Chouinard-Mitchell said.

The same philosophy applies to female tuba players, she said.

“It’s like, ‘Well, you play like a girl.’ Well, yeah, if you practiced, you could, too.”