Inside the Epic Search for Philly’s Next Tuba Master

Curtis Institute of Music has only one tuba student. What does it take to make it? / Illustration by Pete Ryan

A young man sits alone in a room, a tuba on his lap, and blows it hard, huffing and puffing to play Snedecor’s Low Étude for Tuba Number 4. It’s a head-rattling piece in a profoundly low register — its lowest note is pedal C, which would be the fourth key from the left on a piano, and it requires Superman lungs and strategic breath control to nail. I’m watching a video with Craig Knox and Paul Krzywicki, the tuba instructors at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. They’re telling me what they’re hearing in this audition reel, submitted by a candidate who hopes to become the elite school’s next tuba student.

“He’s taking a lot more breaths, and yet he’s still running out of air at the end of the phrases,” Knox observes. “There’s a fluffy attack at the beginning of notes, where we would like to hear a nice clean front.”

“He’s not having as much fun as the other boy had,” Krzywicki says more bluntly, comparing this to a previous video. “There’s a certain degree of terror in his face, isn’t there?”

This month, Curtis’s sole tuba student, Ethan Marmolejos, will graduate, which has given rise to a global search. Curtis enrolls a total of around 160 students but just one tuba student at a time, because a symphony orchestra only has one tuba. In its century of existence — Curtis this year celebrates its 100th anniversary as one of Philadelphia’s truly world-class institutions — the school has admitted a total of 37 tuba students, making this one of the rarest study opportunities in the world. Mathematically, Penn State admits more students per day, though, granted, they don’t all play tuba.

Even other exclusive performing-arts schools don’t have just one tuba; Juilliard carries three or four. But entrée to Curtis is prized; tuition is free, covered by an endowment, and learning here is often the ticket to an illustrious career in symphony orchestras. About 45 percent of the musicians in the Philadelphia Orchestra and 18 percent of those in the New York Philharmonic attended Curtis. The Curtis tuba student who preceded Marmolejos, Cristina Cutts Dougherty, became principal tubist for the Phoenix Symphony at age 25, replacing David Pack, who’d held the seat for 48 years.

“There’s no school in the world that has had such success as Curtis employing people in the orchestral world. No place even close,” Krzywicki says. It’s why, when the chance arises, music students stop what they’re doing to try to get in.

Knox is a Curtis grad — the fourth to become principal tuba for the Pittsburgh Symphony. Krzywicki, who played in the Philadelphia Orchestra for 33 years, was his teacher. Now, they’re deciding who’s next. The school has very rarely opened auditions to outsiders before. But my weird fascination with tuba players seems to have disoriented them, and they agree to let me chronicle the process.

To me, playing tuba as a life choice is an exquisite act of hope — proof there’s still a place in this clickbait-influencer world for the under-loved specialist in a field with a barely existent job market. Tuba players are like unicorns (which literally means “one horn”) without the sparkle. In an orchestra, they pull a heavy load with no glamour, hidden in the back, like a subwoofer behind the couch.

If a wailing saxophone is the cry of the soul, the tuba has been likened to another human expression: Novelist Peter De Vries called the tuba “the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.” Mockery and comparison to gastric disturbance is the tubist’s fate. In the children’s book Tubby the Tuba, “fat little” Tubby dreams of playing a lovely melody, but the more delicate symphony instruments laugh in his face. He retreats shamefully to a pond, ugly-duckling-style, where a bullfrog teaches him a beautiful tune that he carries back to the orchestra, and the instruments love it so much that they all join in (hijacking his solo!). In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, to illustrate what a mega-nerd Steve Carell’s character is, he parades around his apartment playing a baritone horn, sometimes known as a tenor tuba.

I ask Knox what kind of oddball loner kid chooses to play tuba instead of being one of the 76 trombones in the big parade, or the dozens of violinists who flock around the conductor like angelic favorites. I suggest it’s like picking the road less traveled. He tells me he titled his tuba-performance album A Road Less Traveled.

“I think I was drawn to the fact that there’s just one of them,” he says. “It’s sort of your own realm. You’re in charge of taking care of business on that low end in the orchestra. You’re the end of the line down there.” When he played soccer in school, he recalls, “I was always the goalie.”

The tuba wasn’t invented until 1835, so Beethoven never wrote a note for it; Mozart never saw one. “Usually if you’re doing a Mozart symphony, the tuba just goes and has coffee,” says Jay Krush, a tuba artist in residence at Temple’s Boyer College of Music and Dance and the tubist for the Philadelphia Ballet. History’s first concerto for solo tuba, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, wasn’t written until 1954. Philip Catelinet, who played its debut for the London Symphony Orchestra, didn’t invite his own wife to the premiere because he assumed it would be ridiculed, confessing to a newspaper reporter, “I would rather suffer alone.”

I ask Knox for examples of tuba in popular music, and he earns his outsider stripes by not really coming up with anything. In movies, he does note, “It’s often sort of a quirky or villainous or threatening character. Curb Your Enthusiasm — what’s his name? There’s a tuba in his soundtrack.” Film composer John Williams is a tuba freak. He wrote his own tuba concerto, and the instrument is in his movies: the motif for Jabba the Hutt, the booming alien mother ship in Close Encounters. 

“It’s a foundational sound,” Knox explains. “I mean, you can have a couple of trumpets, French horns, some of these high-register instruments, and they can play a chord and sound really, really great. But then you put a tuba underneath that, with a firm bass resonance, and it just makes the sound 10 times fuller.”

What I discover is that when you start listening for tuba in a symphonic piece or brass quintet, you hear substance, gravitas, a pumping lifeblood and not mere intestinal disturbance. It feels more like a heart than a fart.

Let’s Get Ready to Rumble

Curtis announces the tubist opening on its website in the fall of 2023; Knox posts the info on Facebook, TubeNet, TubaForum, and other platforms where prodigies might be lurking. “We want to leave no stone unturned,” he tells me. With a December 15th deadline, applicants must submit videos of them playing five (for undergraduates) or seven (for graduate students) pieces Knox has selected to expose skills and weaknesses. Based on the video pre-screening, promising applicants will advance to stressful in-person auditions at Curtis — housed in a row of buildings off Rittenhouse Square that includes a mansion once inhabited by the school’s founder, Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist — in mid-February, after which one winner will be chosen. Thanks to the tough repertoire and considering past auditions, Knox expects only 30 or so video submissions from around the world. In November, he’s surprised to see his Facebook posts have been viewed 88,000 times.

In his time at Round Rock High, near Austin, Texas, Miles Bintz played in the concert band and the marching band, at football games and state competitions. Now 20, he’s a sophomore studying tuba at Texas Tech. While practicing to audition for the Nashville Symphony last fall, he saw Knox’s TubeNet post about the Curtis opening — and though he’s already in college, he decided to go for it. “That’s the place to be if you’re going to be a classical symphony-orchestra musician,” he says. He rents the college’s choir room, records his videos, and submits his application.

Christian Jeon, 19, learned about the Curtis opening early. He studies tuba at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, where his instructor is none other than Craig Knox. “Even before Craig’s Facebook posts, people were talking about, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s going to be an opening,’” he says. In 2022, Jeon decided to post a video of himself performing every day for a year. He thinks that helped him get good enough to win acceptance to the National Youth Orchestra after he’d been rejected on his first try. Last year, he played with the Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

Knox and Krzywicki could select a graduate student, a transfer, a true freshman, or someone even younger; high-school-age kids have been accepted to Curtis. They take high-school classes locally or online while studying there, then get a college degree at the institute, staying for five years or more. Regardless, there’s still just one tuba spot. “It’s a crapshoot between the young player with potential and the older player who’s more advanced,” Krzywicki says of the decision.

Raphael Zhu, from Princeton, started playing tuba in fifth grade, joined the Philadelphia-based Young Musicians Debut Orchestra in seventh grade, and entered Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program in eighth. Now he’s in ninth grade, 14 years old. “I was talking with some of my friends who are in college now, so they’re a lot older, and they were talking about how the student at Curtis is graduating. They’re like, ‘Maybe you should audition,’” he tells me. “I’ve always heard about all the really young violin prodigies that go to Curtis. But until last year, I never thought about it.”

Over the holiday break, the tuba professors count the applications. There are 43 — the most they ever remember getting, from 19 states, China, Israel and Canada. Knox calculates that selecting one out of 43 yields an acceptance rate lower than those of Harvard, MIT and Stanford.

Weirdly, all the applicants are male. I wonder if there’s lingering fallout from a sexual-abuse scandal involving a Curtis violin teacher in the 1980s — a disgrace the school hushed up until it finally broke as news in 2019. But about half of Curtis students now are female. I confer with Dougherty, and she says the lack of female applicants could be connected to the abuse revelations but adds, “The reality is that the road for women in our field is still more lonely and harsh than it is for men.” Instruments can become gendered as early as elementary school, and girls may be discouraged from even trying the big horn. Carol Jantsch, the Philadelphia Orchestra tubist who taught at Curtis, is a role model, but there aren’t many. A 2019 study of 40 top orchestras found tuba had the second-highest percentage of male players: 90 percent. (Timpani was 100 percent; harp was the most female.)

Still, Dougherty had a great experience studying with Knox and Krzywicki. “The effect they both had on my confidence and sense of self was remarkable,” she tells me. “If all the aspiring women in my field got to study with them, the world would be a better place.”

The instructors spend close to 20 hours apiece watching the student videos before comparing notes. They know what they’re listening for, like figure-skating judges waiting for daring leaps. “This, for me, is really just to screen out people who clearly aren’t ready,” Knox says, and cues up examples of great and not for me.

Watching Jeon play the Vaughan Williams concerto, Knox says, “The clarity of articulation is really important here. He hit every note right on the money. You’re gonna hear some other people who essentially fake a lot. They sort of poke at the notes.” Krzywicki is impressed by the video of Zhu: “I would have never guessed a 14-year-old kid would come in and play like that,” he says. 

The instructors narrow the field to 16, including Bintz, Jeon and Zhu, and invite the group to Philadelphia for winner-take-all Sweet 16 madness. Nothing will matter except their short performances in front of the judges — not reputation nor résumé. “That’s the real world, isn’t it?” Krzywicki explains. “When a job opening happens in an orchestra, you’re judged based upon what you do on the stage for those 10 or 15 minutes.” 

There Can Be Only One

The next challenge is getting to Philadelphia with the huge F tuba and even bigger C tuba required to play the audition pieces. Many tubists drive long distances to avoid flying with fragile, grossly oversize instruments. Bintz considers a 26-hour road trip from Lubbock but ends up making plane reservations. He checks one tuba in baggage and buys a seat for the big one.

Once you arrive, you can start worrying. “Curtis is a very scary place to enter when you know nothing about it,” Dougherty tells me. “It looks like a big mansion — all these chandeliers and pictures of old guys staring at you. I think in my first audition, that really freaked me out. I felt like there was no way I would be good enough.”

This year’s auditions don’t take place in Field Concert Hall, where Leopold Stokowski taught, but in a modern building that contains performance spaces, dorms and a cafeteria. Jeon has no idea what to expect; he says he imagined “like a huge orphanage-type thing.” Bintz envisioned a sprawling campus.

It’s still imposing. Gould Rehearsal Hall, the size of a small gymnasium, is an acoustically precise room with wainscoting tilted back three degrees to make every sound resonate. It’s set up with a lone chair and music stand for the tubist, facing a table where Knox and Krzywicki sit in judgment. Fear works against you. “Once you’re nervous, the tension doesn’t allow you to move your air without some restriction. And that’s bad news for the tuba,” Krzywicki says.

The 16 candidates arrive on a February morning. Each will play for 15 minutes. Selected finalists will audition again in the early evening. “It’s a gruesome day,” Krzywicki acknowledges. 

Bintz is first and grabs his big horn, nailing the Snedecor étude. On a lively Bach bourrée adapted for tuba, Knox requests “firmer intonation … a little more clarity at the front of the notes.” He does this frequently, asking players to change things up, testing their ability to adapt to instruction. “I felt like I was making some of the best sounds that I’ve made in a long time,” Bintz says afterward.

Jeon, up next, shines on the Vaughan Williams concerto. “I played close to my best, in my opinion,” he tells me. “There are some things that obviously could have gone better. But I was very happy.”

As the candidates play, one by one, a wet spot develops on the floor where they empty their spit valves. “It’s just nerves; they’re not playing that long,” Krzywicki tells me.

When it’s Zhu’s turn, the judges ask him to fill his lungs and play with more force, seeming to suggest he’s too small for his instrument. Krzywicki asks about his parents’ size, pondering future growth. “I felt like their biggest concern may have been that I couldn’t put up enough sound,” Zhu explains to me. 

Then the candidates wait nervously, crammed silently with their giant tuba cases in the front lobby. Tuba players are hard to excite. They’re like the placid Brad Pitt character in Ad Astra, whose heart rate never rises above 80. In the big room, Knox and Krzywicki give the names of four finalists to Shea Scruggs, Curtis’s chief of enrollment, and he walks downstairs for the announcement. Bintz is in. “I kind of jumped. I didn’t really expect it,” he says. Jeon is in. Zhu isn’t. Nobody smirks or cries. Bintz and Jeon shake hands. Others put their heads down and roll their tuba cases out onto Locust Street. The more auditions you go on, the more you learn not to take it personally, Shakespeare said. No, sorry, it was Paula Abdul.

“There were a handful of players who were shaky. I could tell they weren’t playing up to what they normally do,” Knox says.

The finals don’t start until almost 5 p.m. Curtis’s dean, Nick DiBerardino, and current tuba student Marmolejos join the judges’ table. Knox changes up the repertoire. There’s an excerpt from Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 that sounds like a sad “Frère Jacques” and includes a low note held for an inhuman 24 seconds. Jeon adds a little sauce on the end of this. “I wasn’t completely confident in my counting, so it’s better to be safe and hold it for longer than you have to,” he explains.

Knox asks the candidates what they hope to get out of Curtis. He hands them sheet music they’ve never seen before. At one point, Krzywicki pulls up a chair right next to Charley Pollard, a tubist from Miami, to observe his face while he plays. By 8 p.m., it’s over. The judges decide within an hour — they don’t even leave the room. But the decision won’t be disclosed for a couple of weeks. “I was just, every day, furiously checking my email,” Jeon says.

The decision message arrives in early March: The winner is … Jeon, Knox’s Carnegie Mellon student. “I screenshotted it,” the young player says. “Told my parents and friends, my high-school teacher. … ”

“The fact was that Christian just sort of blew away all the older kids,” Krzywicki says. Bintz, named first alternate, will stay at Texas Tech. “We’ll see where life takes me,” he says philosophically. Though Jeon is a transfer, he’s offered four full years at Curtis, so the judges might not do this again until 2028. They plan to keep their eyes on Zhu. “Paul and I agree he played better than many of the graduate applicants even though he was 14,” Knox says. “It’s hard to predict. But, you know, I hope maybe we hear him at the next audition.”

And so the world will have another Tubby, a musician hoping to sit without fanfare in the back of a major orchestra. The website Priceonomics did an analysis of the job market for tubists and calculated that “even if you were the best tubist in the world there’d be only a 10 percent chance you’d have a chance to apply to audition for a major symphony orchestra this year.” Dougherty tells me there are currently no scheduled auditions for full-time orchestral tuba jobs in America.

Marmolejos, who’s graduating this month, has been looking. “I’ve gotten some second places,” he says gamely, “have gotten in some final rounds. It’s a pretty tough world in terms of employment. There are probably 20 orchestras in the U.S. that pay above $50,000 a year. Sometimes, almost 200 people show up to these things, and they only choose one.” Unicorns aren’t easily deterred, though. “It’s been great,” he says.

Published as “The Battle of Big Horn” in the May 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.