Mute your Wagner tuba

Several works call for muted Wagner tuba, particularly by Strauss and Schoenberg. A horn mute will not work and really mutes for any other brass instrument won’t work. They traditionally have been very nearly custom made for a particular set of instruments. If you need one in a pinch what will you do?

Last year packing up from the IHS Denver symposium I had an interesting encounter in the parking garage. Ion Balu of Balu mutes was also packing up. His mutes are among the best out there and in our brief conversation somehow it came up that he was developing a Wagner tuba mute and I had two Wagner tubas in the van. So he tested right there the first prototype of this mute, a revised version of which was sent to me and is seen in these photos.

Besides looking cool and being available easily in the United States, this new mute has one interesting innovation. The corks are removable, they attach to the body of the mute with Velcro, and it is shipped with two sizes of cork so that you can adjust the mute to fit a tenor or a bass of any manufacture. The page where Balu lists the mute is here. One of the first purchasers was the Cleveland Orchestra, and according to Michael Mayhew, Associate Principal Horn, “Everyone likes the mutes. They are beautiful, and they are in tune and sound good.”

One other usage of this mute, not intended by the maker but quite interesting, is it may be used on horn without the corks. It is in tune and the tone is somewhere between that of a practice mute and a straight mute. If you are looking for a new sound, this is one other place to look.

Congratulations Ion Balu on a great product.

And, to put in a brief plug, I will include Wagner tubas in my session on “Instruments Your Teacher Never Told You About” at the IHS symposium in Illionis, be sure to check it out if you attend.