Attention Steven Mead Fans!

Are you a current or former student of Steven Mead? Are you a huge Steven Mead fan and taken a few lessons with him? If so, I would like to contact you to ask for your participation in a questionnaire for my doctoral treatise. My name is Robert Pendergast and I studied with Steven while attending the Royal Northern College of Music. I'm writing my treatise on Steven Mead's career and teaching philosophies. With his gracious assistance, I'm creating a data base of his past and present students from all over the world. If you are interested in participating, please contact me at stevemeadtreatise@yahoo.com. Thank you very much, and I look forward to hearing from you soon!

RP (about my treatise) I would like to write about some biographical information as it pertains to your playing career, and pedagogical 'stuff,' teaching philosophies in other words.

RP I thought the whole brass band culture in England to be quite interesting. It seems very different from the way brass playing is approached in America which is rather didactic in two primary ways. (oral/repertoire based vs. methodology)

SM Well in England you've got this strange thing of the oral tradition of the brass band teaching which has some times very little roots in traditional brass teaching. It's more a hand me down tradition of brass teaching and brass band playing culture, and to some extent the work that goes on at the music conservatories has to fill in all the spaces. You know, most of the euphonium players I get who come into the “Northern,” the U.K. guys and ladies, can usually play pretty well, but they don't know anything about the music they play, or how they do things. In other words, if they don't know what they do, it's impossible to fix it when it goes wrong. And it's impossible to put and basis behind their own teachings. So…

RP What do you do to help them gain awareness of stuff like that? (how they do things)

SM Well, it depends where they are; I mean, it depends where the gaps are. My brief as a teacher at the Northern is to try to get everybody playing the euphonium well enough to get through all their exams, and do a good recital, and get a quality degree the M.Mus, or the PGdip, whatever they're working on. Usually, I try to explain to them what they're doing. How brass playing works. How they are using the air what's the purpose of the different muscle groups, etc, etc, because they really don't know. You know the old thing about 'I want to get a bigger sound, well you need a bigger mouthpiece.' You start with these kind of old traditions of playing - the same with articulation. If I said: (to a hypothetical student) “What are you doing with your tongue?”(answer) I have no idea. How did you make that Vibrato? I don't know; I just do it. So, that shows they've improved during their career, up until when I see them, simply by imitating people rather than actually being taught because the level of brass teaching generally in the U.K. is very poor outside of the conservatories. But of course, we're getting students 18, 19 years of age who have ten years of engrained habits.

RP So when you're teaching, how much emphasis would you place on instruction compared to imitation?

RP One of the things I thought was great when we were taking lessons was that you would just play and I would be like, Oh! (That's what I'm supposed to sound like)

SM Yeah, well, I mean… (perhaps a bit embarrassed?)…I'm in a lucky position that I'm a brass teacher who can play anything that the students have got in front of them. There are a lot of great teachers that don't play anymore, so they have to rely on much more on verbal instruction and sometimes even more kind of psychological games with them. They get very pictorial, and that really helps a lot of students. They're those who are very analytical, very technical in their explanation of how it happens. For me the best teaching involves a combination of motivation, psychological factors, such as how well do you want to play? What are you thinking about when you do that and structure and practice routine. There are people you can tell all your best things. And I always say to students, 'I have no secrets, I'll tell you everything. But you know those who have that little 'x' factor; that desire, that motivation, and even that natural feeling for natural playing…They will make it and others won't.

SM There's very few that have been fairly poor players that have turned out to be extraordinary players. There are some journeymen players that make 5% progress every six months…and they keep doing that when they've left (RNCM) as well because they are those kinds of people who love to keep striving. So the personality is an incredibly powerful element in somebody's development as well.

RP I've read in an interview with Holte that described what seemed to be your teaching philosophy. You treat each individual, individually and you want them to be happy individuals and also to play euphonium very well.

SM Yeah, I remember saying that on numerous occasions. Realistically, I have to bear in mind also, that although when I'm training students at the higher level, at the age 18-plus, although I'm working with them as if they are trainee euphonium soloists, I know that in the end, probably actually less then 5% will actually earn a living from doing just that. Most of them will drift into some kind of brass teaching. This is why putting some kind of background behind what they do is essential. Show them teaching materials that exist. We've had classes this year just looking at study books for youngsters, and examining what we think about them, and how you would use them, and at what age you would bring in certain techniques, and whether it's important when working with young people whether you have an absolutely rigid way of doing things-almost like the Suzuki method for violin. But the reality of the situation for people teaching youngsters in the school is that your contact time is so small-20 minutes a week and they're in a group of three.

RP So did your experience of teaching high school/secondary school level help with teaching euphonium?

SM Massively, Massively! Because the training for that is not just … [music related]. The stuff I learned at university during my music degree, I mean I have probably used a quarter of it ever in high school teaching, even in the exam classes. So it was more a question of understanding child psychology, simple classroom maintenance because I was working with classes of thirty, thirty-two kids.

SM Yeah, I was teaching music classes, but we had music in the curriculum in the high school. So every child between the age 11 and 14 will have hour of music a week, whether they like it, want it, need it, or not. So often you imagine on a Friday afternoon, the last lesson of the day, you got 32 fourteen-year-olds of which only four of them show any kind of real musical aptitude, and if particularly if its kind of a mixed middle ability class you've got some 'characters' in there. So that taught me an awful lot about…because if you can motivate them, I mean not that you're going to turn them into great musicians, but you can really get them to appreciate the value of music, and how they can be creative, and how they need to be disciplined, and how they need to work in a group, and how they need to listen, because a lot of people just don't listen anymore. All of those skills, I could say that there is a parallel between working with 32 fourteen-year-olds, and doing a class of 11 or 12 euphonium enthusiasts at the Royal Northern. You don't have the same behavioral problems or the same desire to stand-up and through things around the room, but the ability to try and encompass the whole group, try to understand individuals' problems without spending an inordinate amount of time with one person, or two people, and providing information and instruction that can be grasped by a large group rather than just one or two people. I've learned that's been essential for me for giving master classes where often in Europe I've got anywhere between 15 and 50 people.

SM Exactly! If you're in a country like Holland or Germany, then they'll understand you, but of course English is the second language, so you've got the added feature of making sure that anytime you say anything that it's phrased in such a way that non-English speakers will get it first hand. So this ability to be concise and not waste words and not use twenty words when three will do has actually become, I think, a very important part of my teaching. I've cut our flowery, overcomplicated ways of saying things and that's actually helped my own playing too.

SM Well basically you just cut out all the crap. You go straight to the important points.

SM Yeah! Sure that's fine. That's crap, K-R-A-P-P, a German word for unwanted detail. So it's looking to simplify things because I know for a fact that I've tried to do that my own playing and I've tried to do it with groups and I've tried to do it with students. So you listen to a student and you can be fairly certain that you know what there problems are right away you may not know what exactly how to fix it or how long it'll take, but you can be quite diagnostic about 'this is your problem,' I mean if it's like, you know, a problem that might offend them, like you have some kind of personality disorder, or you just have no confidence, you where probably beaten when you were younger, you know you don't just spurt it out. There are things that register immediately, like: you have a really nice sound, you have a great technique, but you've never-ever immersed yourself in quality music because your musicality is completely primitive. So you can think that, and you say what needs to be said at that point and that becomes a kind of work in progress be you and your student.

RP You are so influential with your playing and the solo repertoire we play, what area do you feel that you've had the greatest influence? Is it repertoire development or quality of playing?

SM Hm, good question. I think what I've tried to do is move things forward fairly evenly on different fronts. I don't think I've done anything with my playing that is new. I'm not inventing a new sound or a new level of technique - I don't think.

RP Hm?! Because, at least my novice …uh…observation would be I see that most people think, they see that sound, at least in America, is so different …so much better than what I've ever heard because it doesn't sound like tuba, it doesn't sound like horn it's like a euphonium sound!

SM Right. I know people say that, but see I don't feel as if, apart from some vocal characteristics in the sound I may be exemplifying more than others. If I look back at the top British players over the past 30 years, there are players whose sounds that I have in my head that I appreciate more than my own. And it's still a model for me to move in that direction. I've meet a lot of players who've got a better finger than I have. But I don't really think of it like that. I think of it as: I try to play the best I can, all of the time, and you try to be totally consistent. You don't just concentrate on any one facet of your playing. You don't just say; “I'm the greatest lyrical player in the world. I don't need my fingers, and look that one doesn't even work.” It's like spinning plates, you know, you've got ten plates on ten poles and you keep them all spinning and every one of those is a facet of playing. So I think that if my playing has a particular strength, it's that I've tried to eradicate any weaknesses. I guess the one weakness which I do have is that I don't really improvise. And nowadays particularly when you're working with guys like this (BBBC) they can just stand up and improvise beautifully and lyrically and with patterns. I guess if I started when I was 12 rather than 40, then I been a bit further down that road.

I guess the thing, one of the key things in terms of answering your question is that when I was about 15-6 years of age, people tried to convince me that although I played euphonium nicely, I would never be able to play it as a career. And the thing is, even though my career has been established, and you know, I earn fairly descent money and because I'm in fairly good health, I hopefully I do that for the next 10 or 15 years. There still always that element of proving to people that the euphonium…that you can earn a living from playing the euphonium. I don't really need to travel as much as I do. I want to, I feel that it's important for the instrument, and there's also that slight addiction to playing and traveling which is hard to (give up)

SM …certainly for the moment. I'm watching my kids grow up from a distance, if you like. James is 13, became a teenager yesterday. And I wasn't there. And I wasn't there for his last three or four birthdays. We'll celebrate when I get back, you know, next Wednesday. But I'm always wishing the kids happy birthday on the phone. I know from that on-going situation and sometimes visibly grow, a long trip like this, 21 days; I can actually see a difference.

SM Yeah. Sport is more important for both of them. They both play squash for the canteen and Alicia has got a try-out for the under-eleven England team. They love squash; they're all just mad about squash. There at the squash court now.

So there's that element of trying to prove to people the value of the euphonium and there's that element of trying to create an important place for the euphonium in several European countries that have a great musical tradition have come to the euphonium late, and who are now trying to play catch-up. They want good teachers, they want information, and they want soloists with their bands and so countries like Italy, where I've been now for 8 years, I've seen massive strides. And a lot of it, you know, I don't blow my own trumpet very often, but a lot of it is because of the work that I've done there. Over the last four years, I've been averaging about 8 trips a year to Italy; I've done more concerts in Italy than I've done in the UK!

SM Yeah! (laughs) I'm staffed at the teaching school in the north in Trenton, and guest soloing with 3 of the 5 top military bands in Rome, concerts from the south of Sicily right up to the northwest-northeast point of Italy.

That's been interesting for me, because if you look at the history of euphonium or the flicorno at the end of the nineteenth century Europe and America was dominated by Italian players. They built up a reputation through Italian banding, through original Italian music by Verdi, and people like that… and Ponchielli, and they wrote very virtuosic pieces and had a feeling for lyricism; they fused those two things together which have always been the two strongest elements of the euphonium world anyway. And then most of their players just disappeared. They went off to America. They got on the boat because Italy, particularly south of Italy, hit incredibly poor times. So they went off and appeared in Chicago and New York. So there's that, there's also trying of fill in the gaps music education because if euphonium is going to be accepted by serious musicians it has to be a part of music conservatories. Until about 1989, it just wasn't, even in the UK.

SM Well, yeah! Amateur tradition, amateur players, amateur teachers, in a way, it's like they don't belong in a professional institution.

SM Oh yeah, great players! But because we're not members of professional musical organizations like a symphony orchestra, then why the hell do you need to study it full time? And there's still that element of dynamic over there. You know the Royal Northern could that twenty euphonium players a year for the number of applications we've got. Then we would be turning out more decent players who will be totally unable to get work. So we take in 3 undergraduates a year. Places like Huddersfield will take up to 6 and 7 because the want to fill up their school and they've got teachers they need to employ. It's a scandal because what are these kids going to do? Well they'll give them a music degree, take up four years of their life and they'll chuck them out in the world, and then they'll think then about what they want to do for a living. So we don't really want to accelerate euphonium education too fast because that professional situation isn't there.

RP You have to worry about ensembles and literature and professional opportunities and also education…

SM Yeah, you could say that we're going to produce more qualified euphonium and baritone players who will become teachers who'll teach the next generation. So that cycle of making players to become teachers who'll teach the next players to become teachers, I mean, you can keep doing that for a couple of more generations, but... And then the repertoire thing, you know, kind of almost happens by accident. If you start playing really well, composers will want to write for you, publishers will want to publish it, and people will want to buy it. And when that sells, publishers think it'll be great if we can get more euphonium music and so and so will write a piece and we'll do some arrangements. You know over the years, I haven't gone around with a check book just saying to composers; “here's x-thousand pounds, please write me a piece.” I've paid for one or two, but hardly any, they usually come to me.

RP Of the pieces that are written and dedicated to you, which one do you feel closest to?

SM I like them for different reasons. I would say probably Martin Ellerby's Euphonium Concerto is probably over a period of time has become the most important. There are pieces I enjoy playing more; that I have to practice less (we both laugh) and there are things that are not quite so intellectual, but I know give people a huge amount of pleasure like the Sparke Concerto, the second movement of that concerto has had people swooning over the beauty of the music but it's not constructed in the same way Ellerby's piece is. There a piece recently called Concertino by Marco Putz, a top wind band composer from Luxemburg, which is a fabulous piece and although he's written for wind band, it's the first piece he's written for euphonium. It's published now and people want to play it. One of the problems is when a composer writes for me, they like to flex their muscles as if to say; “Let's see if he can play this. Let's see if this note's possible.” And usually I find a way around of doing it, but then piece is almost totally unpublishable because they'll look at it and publishers will say, “Well do you want to sell three or four copies of this?” It's like; “What do you mean?” “Who's going to play this?” “Well Steve can play it.” Duh! Well what it means probably 15 players in the UK can play it and about 10 players in the US and in the rest of the Europe, about another 10, but most of those top players don't buy music anyway, they like publishers to give it to them. (laughs)

RP I have one piece on my mind that I remember you mentioned in lessons. It's not originally a euphonium piece, its Butterworth's Summer Music, ah …Op. 92?

SM Yeah, it's been done with piano. It was originally for bassoon and orchestra he then rewrote it for euphonium, and I gave the first performance of it with piano in 1997 at the Northern, I have a recording of it, and I've done the second movement which is called “Nocturne” at quite a few recitals including at ITEC, so the piece has sort of been out there, but it's not published so people can't get their hands on it. And the whole thing is 23-4 minutes long and a piece with the nice charming title, Summer Music of which the middle movement is a nocturne. People think it's going to be a nice, little dreamy ten minute piece, but it's as hard as hell and it's quite angular and very dark. He could have called it Winter Music and it could have been more effective. Yeah, I mean, the first and last movements, well all of it is pretty dark actually because he likes Carl Neilson, the Scandinavian composer, sort of a modern Sibelius so it's not kind of a laugh and a joke at all. It's a great piece that should be out there, but to persuade a publisher to take that on is quite tough.

RP You've found lots of music that's forgotten about, it seems. How did go about discovering these pieces?

SM I would say at least half of it is music I've encounter on my travels. Sometimes it's been hearing it played on another instrument and thinking; probably nobody in the UK knows about this; it'll probably work, some horn pieces, bassoon pieces, some flute pieces and cello pieces particularly. Sometimes it's lyrical and sometimes it's technical, you do just get kind of a sixth sense of how it would sound on euphonium and often it works sometimes when you got string music with no breaks, for example, you know you'll have to chop it up a bit to breathe. And sometimes when you've got flute music that stays above the stave the whole time you know is going to be hard. The same thing with French horn music that you think will sound nice at the original pitch can have you playing the top of the stave the whole time and some of these horn pieces are absolute killers.

And sometimes I just go out and try to find things that'll work, and that's when I've got a bit of down time. I get kind of anxious and got to find some new stuff and so I'll go to the music store and buy a book of songs, French folk songs, or whatever, Irish reels Scottish ballads and kind of just play them through. Every now and then…It's like looking for gold, I mean you can pan through this stuff and then you'll find something that might work or could work and every now and then you'll find a piece that you just fall in love with. And the Piazzolla, the Café 1930, people (euphoniumists) know it now, but when I started playing it, people really didn't know very well. Now I get three or four requests a week on how I can get a hold of this piece? And I said well, the version I used originally was published for soprano saxophone, and then someone said I heard the Yo-Yo Ma recording so then I went to the store and bought that…similar arrangement, but he embellished the solo part and sounded like the real deal, really authentic. So I took the notes I had and added some of the Yo-Yo Ma stuff on it, showed it to my Italian pianist who had also done some Piazzolla with somebody else who said normally we do this and this so we came up with an amalgam of influences. I don't claim it to be my own, but I claim that worked out for the euphonium fairly well. It's going to be published pretty soon.

SM Ah yes, that's another piece I've found on my travels. So about 1990 I found that piece. I was doing a summer course south of Valencia. And I had about 7or 8 in the group and I had turned up with all my euphonium solos at the time and study books showing them and photocopying them for you and I said to the guy, the best player there, Miguel, his first name is the same as the composer's that's how I remember his name, I said; “what have you got there?” and he said “Solo de Concurso. Do you know that one?” I said “No I don't know it.” And so he said, “You don't know Solo de Concurso?!” in Spanish, ¡Hola! Because it was like we British players would know Pantomime or something, you know. It could be played on bombardino or tenor saxophone it was one of those mixed solo things, and I played through and it was great! It's hard as hell and it's great and nobody knows it so he did me a copy. I noticed it was published in Madrid in about 1950 and then it went the filing cabinet and then often what makes me really hungry to find new pieces is when I have a recording project come up.

So I was looking for stuff for World of the Euphonium Volume 2, I think it was, because I've got hundreds of pieces that I've never played, I've just picked up traveling, played once and I thought, hum, that's interesting, really hard. Then when I'm looking for pieces I find and it's like; I'm going to learn this now, and you very quickly find out whether it's going to work out or not, and that's the motivation to really get it under your fingers is to program it.

So yeah, that was a really nice find and that is probably one of the best examples of find a piece just by rubbing shoulders with people from different countries. Same with a lot of the Italian music, a lot of the melodies on the Bella Italian CD I haven't heard, I meet this conductor of the Italian military band and we started talking about a lyric album for euphonium. He started singing all these things in a bar one night; “do you know this one?” “No it sounds nice.” “Do you this one?” (Sings melody) And it's like; I've heard that. He said, “We could do an arrangement of that.” “And do you know the 'Ave Maria' from Othello?” (Sings melody) and I said “no, I've never heard that one; it's beautiful we'll do that one.” “Really, you like it?” I said, “Yeah it's great.” So I discovered about 10 tunes from fairly famous Italian operatic composers that I never knew existed just because I met this guy who insisted on singing them all to me, and was also the conductor of the most important military band in Rome. He then said to Besson could you cosponsor a recording because we have to record these. He did most of the arrangements himself, and then we did it.

RP It seems that not only do composers want to compose for you, but you are also adding a lot to the repertoire by finding pieces in various ways. And some of them are somewhat original or historic pieces.

SM Yeah, I would say that one of the really exciting pieces in the last 3 years has been a piece called Sir Eu which was written by Thomas Dos who is a top wind band composer in Austria. I've met him a few times. He's like what they call him Austrian Phillip Sparke because he writes in a very easy melodic way, but loves to write difficult stuff. And he came to a concert I did with Sound in Brass which is an Austrian symphonic brass ensemble. I met him again two months later and we went out for a meal and the after the meal he and another guy whose was responsible for the music in Austria from an educational point of view, they went to the bar, but I went to bed because I had a concert the next day, but when I came down to breakfast the next morning they told me that the guy in charge of music had actually commissioned Thomas to write me a piece. The deal was signed and sealed. I'd get it in about 6 month's time; we recorded it and toured with it. So yeah, I mean it's nice. I'm not as active really as I should be probably for commissioning. Simply because if you're on the road the whole time and hopping between gigs and traveling and I've got a CD business now, not 'seedy' a CD business (laughs) as well as the sales side of the website which I'm going to do with my wife. You know if you're going to keep an eye on everything as well as practicing and keeping yourself in shape you just run out of hours in a day. So I could be doing more, but I think at the age of 43 I've probably done enough that I could take my foot off the gas for a year or two before I hit the floor with it again. I want to get a bit more space then I'll probably commission some more pieces. Hopefully the next generation, the guys who are in their late twenties will step up to the plate, that's what you Americans say, isn't it? And be active and they are. I mean David Childs has been very active with commissioning pieces within the UK. David Thornton has been very active. Once you get past those two guys, a lot of the other brass band guys are just content to sit back and play in their brass band. You know, if said to them, “Look guys if you don't work hard, then the euphonium could be extinct within 15 year's time.” They could say well it doesn't matter because I'll have finished playing by then. You know there's that kind of mentality of let other people take care of the future and it drives me mad, very frustrating. But there are others who are real dynamos now in Austria for the euphonium who commission stuff and do concerts in their own way in their own area. You know, it like reverberating out. There's at least 6 or 8 Italians who are in their own environment are securing the future.

RP Well, I'm talking with someone to commission a work for euphonium, flute and percussion - possibly two flutes

SM Yeah, and what we're seeing in Washington D.C., post-Bowman, post-Roger Behrend actually trying to do anything creative and positive. With Michael Colburn now in charge of…you know conducting and he was probably our greatest young hope because his such a smart guy, his gone up and beyond it all. Good luck to him.

SM I have done. I've actually composed more and arranged stuff more for band. I wrote a piece for Battle Creek two years ago for a Christmas concert, but it took me months. It was horrible, deadlines approaching, “have you got yet?” “Can you send it to us on Finale?” “No, probably in the next week.” I would be traveling and I would be trying to find a piano in the hotel. It was just so bloody stressful, but of course if I didn't have a deadline, it wouldn't have got done at all. Arrangements, I've done a lot of arrangements for euphonium and tuba-euphonium quartet. Over the years I've done a lot. When I was teaching at high school, I did loads of arrangements. I arranged music for a whole school show including writing an overture for a show that did have an overture for like a 18 piece band and I remember really enjoying that but it's just time. Right now every time I'm composing, I could be practicing. That's where we are, you know. So…in the future-the same with conducting, I love to conduct. I think I'm quite good. People tell me it's clear and exciting and all that stuff, but again when I'm preparing scores and when I'm doing gigs and doing this…it ain't working.

SM Yeah, you see a lot of people trying to do a little bit of everything and in the brass world, I don't think they do it terribly well. When I get really fed-up with playing which I can't image, but it'll probably come at some time, then I'll probably jump to conducting and …I'm not sure about arranging, it just seems like so much hard work.

SM Only daily exercises and routine stuff. I've been lucky working with DeHaske that they have a portfolio of about 25 composers who wrote these concert studies for the New Concert Studies book. One or two of them I was playing through and I thought I could write better than this - and then a voice says: “then why don't you?” - because, you know, blank manuscript disease. So no, I write a lot of studies for students and for master classes that we play together, but they're often more exercises to keep you in shape- so there's a gap there for sure that I would like to fill at some stage.

RP Yeah…like say, your version of the Arban's…I remember that you had specific ideas about some of the exercises and even changed a few of them to meet your student's needs.

SM Well I keep running into really good books like the Basics Plus books which I use now. And it's like so many of the methods are exactly as I teach. And so the exercises hit the spot so why sit down for six months and write a book that is just like this, but written by me.

RP Okay…just wondering. I know the simple answer is just practice, but how do you become so good with the multiphonics and what lead you to that extended technique?

SM Ah…because when I was a kid, I was a singer. Between the ages 7 and 13, I took singing lessons every day. I had more singing lessons than brass lessons until that age and so it was also the challenge of being able to trying to do something that I heard somebody else do. That was the initial motivation. It was Bill Watrous I heard and that goes back to 1980 I suppose. I was 18 and just at university and I heard a recording that was kicking around “Bill Watrous Live in London” and he wasn't just playing (buzzes and sings a note) he wasn't just playing notes; he was playing away and picking them out. And of course it was like a beginning of a journey to try a, two notes that were controllable and then vary one and vary the other then make them work independently and the rest is up to your imagination. So for me it was a combination of using it in encore pieces to entertaining to do things that people wouldn't expect or haven't heard before. It was also a kind of ear training thing; I could control this and I could control this which is different so it was that kind of challenge. It's also extremely therapeutic for the lips because you're getting a double vibration. Sometimes when I'm practicing hard I'll do 5 minutes of multiphonics then carry on playing. It puts the blood back in the lips. It's a combination of things because my interest in singing goes back as I say to when I was kid. So there still that little boy singer lurking inside.

RP It's very interesting what you say about singing and playing as therapeutic or part of a warm-up, because I know there's a technique for flute which they practice it in unison to help open-up the sound.

SM I seem to remember when I was about 16, I went on a brass band trip to Holland and there was a fluegel horn player who would do it really loud in every dressing room that we would go into. And eventually somebody would say, “what the [blank] you doing that for?” Well it was great just to relax the lips and there was something that stuck in my head about the fact if you could do it, you could do for that as well. But as I say I normally do it just purely for show-off.

SM (Laughs) Occasionally in a piece or in a cadenza, if you hit right, at the right time, it creates a (breath taking moment) if you overdo it then you're being comedic and you better be funny otherwise they'll soon be tired of it. So you just got to get it right.

RP There's one recording I have in mind especially with the Canadian Salvation Army Band.

SM You see I never wanted them to record that really because the kind of arrangement I have. That funny stuff needs an audience but also I do differently every time. It needs visual but it's on there now. So that was the only time Facilita ever came out on a commercial disc. But often if you're doing a concert or recital and it's somebody's birthday to you in multiphonics and actually sing the words through the instrument as well so the people can recognize their name. (Demonstrates) when they can hear that coming out through the horn it's like wow, and then they can try it in their own language. The language thing is very interesting in Europe.

RP My closing question for today is; why did you choose the euphonium? I remember reading in your biography that you switched from tenor horn.

SM No, it was the instigation of the conductors of the junior band that I was playing in. and there were two main guys who took me from the age of 6 when I started to up until about 14 who were very good, motivating youth brass band conductors and initially it was quite clear that although I could read music and I could sing, I couldn't play high notes on the cornet so they put me on tenor horn where I stayed for a couple of years and was very happy and then, I think I was making a big sound and they needed a baritone player. I was playing with more technique and sound than the euphonium player who probably left the youth band and so that was it. They moved me up and that was it - moved me down rather. I just like playing a brass instrument. If I think back now, I wasn't in love with the euphonium at the age of 10, but by 13 I definitely was. So I think as I matured… I think it was about my 12th birthday I got a brass band LP that really seemed to hit the mark. There was something about the sound of the euphonium player that was like, I could do that.

SM He does now. When I was young and throughout his whole brass band career, he played tenor horn. Then about 8-10 years ago, when he basically retired from banding, he changed to trombone. He taught himself trombone because the local village band, he was always in the Salvation Army band, the village band wanted a trombone player so he taught himself trombone and then about 2 _ - 3 years ago he switched to the euphonium. So on my website now there's a picture of me playing a duet with my dad- last year which was fantastic. So I had to introduce him as my duet partner, my dad- a lovely moment.

RP So we could have been talking to the best tenor horn player, but luckily for us you decided to play the euphonium. Thanks so much for taking your time for this interview.

Interview with Steven Mead Melbourne, FL - Sunday, March 20, 2005

Interview with Steven Mead
Melbourne, FL - Sunday, March 20, 2005