Carlotta Reiner, wife of Chicago Symphony conductor Fritz Reiner, used to pat Arnold Jacobs affectionately on the cheek whenever she spotted him backstage at Orchestra Hall after the orchestra`s concerts in the `50s.
”Arnold,” she would gush, echoing the sentiments of her husband (who would never compliment any orchestra player directly), ”you are the best damn tuba player in the world.”
To this day, the testimony has stuck. No tubist has seriously challenged Jacobs` supremacy. His influence as pedagogue is as widely admired as his tuba playing, though he has never promoted himself as a teacher or written any teaching methods.
Ask any leading brass or woodwind player in America who is the most important teacher he or she ever studied with, and nearly everyone will cite Arnold Jacobs. Among these musicians he is a legend, a modern Aeolus, Greek god of wind. Even if they never actually took lessons from him, his ideas about the principles of breathing and the psychology of making music have seeped so thoroughly into the collective sensibility of orchestral wind players that they might as well have.
Now, the man known to his friends and students as ”Jake,” who has served as the Chicago Symphony`s one-man tuba section for 44 seasons, has decided to step down. At 73, Jacobs feels it is time. He is the second-longest-tenured player in the orchestra, followed by trombonist Frank Crisafulli, a 49-year veteran. Jacobs has a long history of poor health, having weathered a heart attack, cancer, asthma, bronchitis and a 1982 operation that left his vision seriously impaired. Although recent surgery has greatly improved his eyesight, he would like to escape the pressures of symphony orchestra life, to spend more time with his wife, Gisella, a native Chicagoan, and generally take things easier in the years that are left to them.
The tubist has agreed to stay on for this week`s season-opening CSO subscription concerts, at which he and fellow retirees Leon Brenner, Donald Evans, Margaret Evans, Samuel Feinzimer and Isadore Zverow will receive the Theodore Thomas Medallion. But after that, the deep, Chaliapin-like tones will emanate from someone else`s horn, and Jacobs, minus tuba and tails, will occupy a different seat-out front at Orchestra Hall, where you can be sure he will be keeping a vigilant ear on things.
”Oh, I`ll miss my colleagues, my musical family. It`s a privilege to play with this great orchestra and brass section, it really is. I feel very fortunate to be a part of it,” he says.
The reluctant legend is a walking, talking textbook of music, and no musician could fail to benefit simply from being in his presence. Most of the Chicago Symphony wind players have studied with him. The select number of professional and college instrumentalists who make the pilgrimage these days to his cluttered studio in the Fine Arts Building find a stocky, avuncular man with gray hair and a miraculous ability to solve almost any performance-related problem.
There, surrounded by a Rube Goldberg-like array of paraphernalia, including oscillators, barometers, breath-measuring devices, machines to generate and analyze musical pitch, air-pressure gauges, an electronic keyboard and two of his six tubas, Jacobs holds forth on his favorite subject: the principles of efficient breathing, of shaping the moving column of air that produces musical sound, which he probably knows more about than anyone alive.
Musicians who study with Jacobs represent all levels of accomplishment, beginner to symphony ace, and they hail from all over the world-trumpeters, trombonists, oboe players, even singers.
Countless older players come to him complaining of reduced lung capacity, chronic stage fright or that their conductors, well, don`t understand them. Jacobs begins by helping them to forget their demons, then to concentrate on
”the product,” their sound. Many of his gadgets are there, in fact, to give his students a visual sense of their wind capacity or of how they may enhance it by various physical or psychological ploys (since he is not a medical doctor, he doesn`t treat anyone or prescribe drugs).
The reigning guru of the tuba offers a simple description of his method.
”I don`t teach them as tuba players, but as human beings,” he explains.
”Whichever instrument they play, they still have to develop as storytellers of music. I insist that the ability to communicate musical messages be dominant.”
”For years, Arnie has studied human anatomy and particularly the respiratory process, which is so important to any wind player,” says Dale Clevenger, the CSO`s principal French horn. ”He`s spent a career breaking down myths and teaching correct respiration. Students often ask me whom I go to when I have a problem. I say Arnold Jacobs and Adolph Herseth (CSO principal trumpet). I`m still learning from them.”
So, for his part, is Jacobs, starting with his chosen instrument. The tuba is the gallumphing phantom of the orchestra, yielding up its secrets reluctantly, at best. If brass instruments are, at least physically, the hardest orchestral instruments to play, the tuba may be the hardest of them all. It was created for signaling use in Roman military bands, a brass monster whose 35 feet of coiled tubing prompted a modern writer, Peter de Vries, to call it ”the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.” ”It is a clumsy instrument,” agrees Jacobs. ”Even if you`re the greatest tuba player in the world, you`re still not going to sound much like a wonderful artist. The average tuba weighs between 20 and 30 pounds. It`s the only instrument I know that gains weight the longer you hold it.
”Composers usually write for tuba as an accompanying instrument, which means (it is) a limited challenge that will produce a limited player, unless he learns to overcome that.”
As the subterranean voice of the orchestra, the tuba functions most effectively in conjunction with the four-man trombone section, forming the low brass choir. It can also be an evocative soloist, as in the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky`s ”Pictures at an Exhibition.” Even so, most tuba players have so little to perform that they regard themselves rather like wallflowers at an orgy. Some of them regularly doze off on the job. For years, Jacobs banished boredom by perusing ”Gray`s Anatomy,” the favorite book of his childhood, which he kept discreetly hidden behind his music stand.
His least favorite symphony, he admits, is the Dvorak ”New World,”
whose tuba part consists entirely of eight notes-four at the beginning of the slow movement, four at the very end. ”It`s embarrassing to just sit there not playing for 40 minutes,” he says.
Born in Philadelphia in 1915, Jacobs grew up in small towns in California. He took a few lessons from his mother, a vaudeville pianist, and learned music by listening to records by the Herbert Clarke band. His first instruments were the trumpet, bugle and an old trombone that he picked up for $10 in a thrift shop.
At 15, he enrolled on scholarship at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. The next year, 1931, he began what became a long association with Fritz Reiner, then conductor of the student orchestra at Curtis. After graduation, Jacobs played with the Indianapolis Symphony, later serving five seasons with Reiner`s Pittsburgh Symphony before joining the CSO in 1944.
”Know how I got this chair? While I was still with the Pittsburgh, someone connected with the CSO called me in to play the Berlioz `Symphonie Fantastique.` Milt Preves and John Weicher (at that time the orchestra`s principal violist and concertmaster, respectively) went up to Desire Defauw, the music director, and said he`d better hire this guy. That`s all there was to it.”
Jacobs` student years-spent in thrall to the Reiner baton-spared him the fate of other Chicago musicians who wilted under the conductor`s Inquisition- like tactics.
”I grew up with Reiner as my conductor, so everything since then had to be easier. He was a wonderful conductor but a brutal person. He didn`t want any nervous players in his orchestra because he felt they would jeopardize his concerts, and he had ways of testing you to see if you were unsure of yourself.
”In rehearsals, he`d challenge you to play something over and over while he listened for mistakes. I remember the first time he played Wagner`s
`Meistersinger` Prelude with us, and he kept going over the same short passage, just a few brass chords. Nobody missed a note. Finally, after half a dozen times, he laughed and went on.”
On the eve of his departure from the ranks of the CSO, Jacobs can take consolation in the fact that the average longevity of brass musicians is high. This is partly because of all the oxygen they must take into their lungs, partly because their sound, unlike that of a flute or oboe, is produced at relatively low pressure. The tubist estimates that, when he was in his tuba-playing prime, at age 20, his lung capacity was about 5 liters, about average for tuba players and non-tuba-playing adult males alike.
Now that he is retiring, the tubist says he plans to transcribe and edit the audiotapes of classes he has taught over the years at Northwestern University for possible use in a teaching manual. He has several research projects pending and is weighing offers of concert tours and master classes. A longtime jazz musician, he is even thinking about forming what he calls ”a geriatric jazz combo.”
But the activity he is looking forward to most is listening to the Chicago Symphony from out in the audience. Having admitted that, Jacobs smiled, perhaps contemplating the thought of hoisting nothing heavier than a program book onto his lap, for a change.
