Book: The Wagner Tuba, A History by William Melton

Book: The Wagner Tuba, A History by William Melton

• English language edition
• 198 pages
• Numerous illustrations
• Many musical examples

The Wagner tuba has accumulated a thick crust of fable in the little over a century and a quarter since its invention.

This book revisits original sources to bring the facts of the instrument’s development to light: the scope of Wagner’s vision, the myriad helpers who gave the vision practical form, the musicians who pioneered the playing technique, and the new generations of composers who adopted the curious little tubas.

Though the scholarship is painstaking, all of these elements are woven into an approachable narrative that ranges widely across the European musical legacy.

William Melton (b. Philadelphia, 1954) was a horn pupil of Sinclair Lott (a protegé of Alfred Brain and Otto Klemperer) and a graduate student in historical musicology at UCLA. He has been a career hornist with the Sinfonie Orchester Aachen in Germany since 1982. He is also a charter member of two horn quartets, ”Die Aachener Hornisten” and ”The Rhenish Horns”, and has toured with them in hundreds of performances on three continents. Melton has twice won the International Horn Society's ”Harold Meek Award” for scholarly articles, he translates books from the German for Schott Music International, and is the author of ”Engelbert Humperdinck: An Odyssey through Wilhelmine Germany”, which will be published shortly by Toccata Press (London).

ISBN 978-3-9808379-1-0