Seattle's brassy reach for musical acclaim

By almost any measure, the Seattle area can claim a piece of the title for creativity among U.S. regions. After all, we're home to software and airplane development, retail innovation, and books galore.

Now comes another high-water mark: the world premiere of a new symphonic work, Samuel Jones' Tuba Concerto, performed this past Thursday and tonight by the Seattle Symphony and itstubaist, Christopher Olka.

That Seattle should be the site for the debut says a lot about the city's character and its community dynamics. Ours is a town of avid music lovers and amateur musicians, unafraid to buck convention. Who, after all, would have ventured a piece for thetuba?

Well, Sandra Crowder did. Her husband, the late James P. Crowder, was one of the area's enthusiastic amateur musicians — a tuba player himself — as well as an aeronautical engineer for Boeing.

After he died two years ago, Sandra Crowder took the idea of commissioning a concerto in his memory to Olka, whom her husband had known. As recounted by Times music critic Melinda Bargreen, Olka then broached the notion with Seattle Symphony Music Director Gerard Schwarz, with Jones, the symphony's composer in residence, in mind for writing the music.

With Crowder's specialty at Boeing being flow visualization, Jones was inspired to incorporate the sense of swirling winds in a wind tunnel as part of his composition, according to Bargreen. What a delicious confluence of vocation and avocation, of sound and sonority.

Needless to say, the concerto strips away the popular but limited stereotype of Tubby the Tuba, good only for a few oom-pah-pahs.

Since Seattle prides itself in dispelling stereotypes, it couldn't be any more fitting that an instrument and its muses should break from obscurity and misunderstanding, center stage, in the Emerald City.