ITEA Journal Volume 47 Number 2 (Winter 2020)

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The Harvard Tuba (part 2):
by Dave Detwiler

Recounting its Glorious Restoration
(last revised October 31, 2019)

On June 28, 2019, I had the chance to sit down with Steve Dillon, owner of Dillon Music in New Jersey, and his highly respected tuba technician, Matt Walters, as they walked me through the most challenging project they have ever taken on together-the restoration of the 130-year-old Harvard Tuba (see part one of this series in the Fall 2019 edition, to learn more about the history of this massive instrument).

Steve, who opened his establishment in 1992, has been "hustling horns," as he put it, since he was in junior high school. It started when he traded two clarinets for a Sousaphone, and then traded that horn for an old helicon bass and another Sousaphone. And he's been in the low brass business ever since!

Photo 1 - Before and after photos with Steve Dillon and Dave Detwiler. (Dave Detwiler)

Matt joined Dillon Music two years after it opened, so twenty-five years ago, having been an aircraft mechanic prior to that, and over the years has become what Steve calls "the tuba whisperer." If you've got a tuba that needs work, Matt's your guy. So, it's no surprise that, when the Harvard Band Foundation chose a team to restore their prized possession, they went with Dillon Music (see photo 1).

Here's the bulk of my hour-long interview with these two friends.

Photo 2 - Mike Roylance performing at Harvard on October 11, 2019 (Stephen Wasserman)

Dave Detwiler (DD): Tell me about being chosen to do this restoration.

Steve Dillon (SD): We were contacted by Michael Ruderman, clerk of the Harvard Band Foundation, and he asked us to examine their giant tuba and give him a bid price to have it restored. We were not the lowest bid, or the highest bid. But they felt comfortable with us because of our love for history, and the fact that we were willing to do basically everything they wanted-and get it done in the amount of time they desired. The instrument is needed for the 100th anniversary of the Harvard Band this October (see photo 2).

Matt Walters (MW): One of the other things we offered was a realistic approach. That is, we didn't promise them the world. We went in with the understanding that, if we felt that any part of the repair would be more dangerous than leaving it as is, we would back off.

SD: However, originally, we were told not to polish the tuba as we restored it. So, I had to decline doing the job, because we cannot do the work on an instrument like that without polishing it. When we disassemble things, when we un-solder things, we have to polish the area to re-solder it back together. And in doing that, without polishing the whole thing, it's going to look terrible, and I didn't want to be connected with that. So, the deal was off at that point.

Photo 3 - Steve Dillon and Matt Walters (behind horn) with "Big Carl" in 2014. (Steve Dillon)

But it just so happened that I was at a board meeting of the National Music Museum shortly after that, and sitting on the board with me was Marlowe Sigal, who, for years, had been spearheading this restoration project for the Harvard Band Foundation. We were at a dinner together, and he asked me, "When are you going to do the restoration on the big tuba?" and I responded, "Marlowe, we're not, because you guys don't want me to polish it. And I can't do that," and I explained why. But once Marlowe understood what we had to do we were back on.

DD: How did you react when you saw the horn for the first time?

SD: The first time we saw it was back in 2003, when it was on display at a regional tuba conference at the University of Massachusetts. But when we went up to Harvard a year or so ago, to check it out and bid on restoring it, we found it in much worse shape than before. Plus, you have to remember that we had already, by this time, examined "Big Carl," which is a much bigger tuba [built for Carl Fischer by Bohland & Fuchs around 1911, although it does not have working valves; see photo 3]. So, while the Harvard Tuba was neat . . .

MW: Yeah, it was neat, but it was just another big tuba.

Photo 4 - Matt contemplating the work ahead. (Steve Dillon)

SD: Because, by that time, you're desensitized. You know, "Big Carl" is almost 8 feet tall! But even still, Matt and I went in to examine the Harvard Tuba and said, "Wow!" But that might have also been because it was pretty banged up since we last saw it.

DD: Were you guys excited to restore this historic instrument?

Photo 5 - Steve playing around with the eighteen pound bottom bow. (Steve Dillon)

SD: [Lots of laughter!] Matthew said it was a curse! He and I went back and forth at first, and he said, "Well, it's kinda like, 'Hooray, we're getting this project!' and on the other side, 'Oh God, I don't want this project!'" (see photo 4).

MW: You see, I didn't want to be the guy who ruined the Harvard Tuba! That's your biggest fear. There are so many things that just can't be redone. Plus, I'm old, and everything's getting harder, and I knew this was going to involve a lot of heavy lifting. For example, the bottom bow, by itself, weighs eighteen pounds (see photo 5). So, when we were buffing it, my arms were shaking after twenty minutes. Even Freddy, who traded off with me, had to stop often, because his legs were shaking after dancing and swinging in the process of buffing that massive part.

DD: Were there any challenges with getting it from Harvard to here?

Photo 6 - The team at Dillon Music. From left to right, Fred Harvey, Evan Judson, Matt Walters (behind horn), Vladimir Friedman, Steve Dillon, and Perry Sutton. (Dave Detwiler)

MW: Yes! There was quite a snowstorm on the drive back down in mid-February. At about the halfway point, when I sent Steve a picture of what we were seeing out the windshield of the van, he said, "If you guys need to go get a hotel . . ." It looked really bad and scary, but we pressed on very slowly, plugging along behind the snow plows.

DD: How did you transport such a massive instrument to keep it from being damaged further, since there is no case for it?

MW: Actually, I was more worried about how to get the horn back to Harvard after I did all of the work, and one of my coworkers, Jake, came up with a wonderful solution: Bean bag chairs! So, we bought a couple of those, put them down in the van, and laid the horn down upon them in a way that kept the weight off of the bell. Then we carefully strapped the instrument down to keep it from moving around. It was an easy, low-tech solution, which is always desirable!

DD: How many people helped with the restoration?

SD: There was you, [pointing to Matt], Fred Harvey, Evan Judson, Vladimir Friedman, and Perry Sutton. So, five guys in all, with at least a couple of them working on the horn almost every weekday from mid-February until the end of June (see photo 6).

Photo 7 - Steve inspiring the troops! (Stephen Wasserman)

DD: And what was your role, Steve?

MW: He signed my paycheck! [Laughter!]

SD: I was the confidence giver, "Come on, we can do this! Let's get going!" I was working in the background saying, "We've got to get this done!"

MW: I needed pushing, because my back was hurting at times!

SD: So, I would go to Freddy and say, "Go in there and help. And get Evan to help." Sometimes you need to muster the troops (see photo 7). It's very difficult to do this thing, if you think about it, and they had to tag-team it at times. But Matt was a genius with all this, although [now looking directly at Matt] your head better not get too big to get out the door [laughter!]. He figured out a battle plan up front. He's very analytical. Once the Harvard Band folks said, "Go," Matt's mind kicked in, thinking through all of the relevant questions to tackle this project.

Photo 8 - Matt and Freddy starting the work. (Steve Dillon)

DD: How did Matt approach the restoration?

SD: When the instrument got here, my inclination was to disassemble the damn thing, but he said, "No, I'm not doing that, because I have to have a blueprint of how to put this back, so we're doing one piece at a time, working from the inside out." So that's what he did, in a very methodical manner.

MW: I had to make sure everything went back to the exact same brace locations, and I needed a reference point. So, I started on the smaller branches, and worked outward, and then took the valve section off, and overhauled that, and then finally went on to the largest outside branches. And that way I always had a reference point (see photo 8).

Photo 9 - Matt and Evan working on the bell. (Steve Dillon)

DD: You guys are not outfitted for working on a seven-foot tuba (who is?!), so you had to have some special tools built for this. Tell me about that.

MW: Curtis Ferree, of Ferree's Tools, was very helpful. He is a tool maker, mostly for instrument repair businesses, and we have one of the legendary Ferree dent machines. It's basically a modified version of an English wheel. But it's limited in length, and I needed to get out a further distance on some of the branches, and for the enormous bell. So, they made some tools for us, and we modified our machine to make it possible to bear down on the long parts without creating any problems.

SD: Honestly, if we didn't have Ferree's help, we wouldn't have been able to do the restoration.

Photo 10 - Matt hand burnishing the bell, with Perry's assistance. (Stephen Wasserman)

DD: The bell was a particular challenge. Share how you approached the work on that.

MW: The bell was definitely too tall for the dent machine. So, we built extension legs to raise the dent machine up about three feet.

SD: And then Matthew had to stand on a chair, with Evan holding the other end of the bell at the bottom. So, this was a two, or three, man job at times (see photo 9).

Photo 11 - Valve levers that had been added at some point. (Dave Detwiler)

MW: Right, and how do you get two or three people working together on a single piece of the horn? I guess it's like those silly picnic games, like the three-legged race, where you have to work in coordination. We experienced the same thing. So, what I would have normally done for a bell rolling, I just couldn't, so we had to figure out how to work together. And after doing the best we could on the dent machine, we still had to hand burnish and blend portions of it back in for it to look great (see photo 10).

DD: What other challenges did you run into while doing the work?

MW: The second valve slide crook, which had a big hole in it. I was able to anneal it, and then bring the opening closer together, and fill that in with a silver solder and get it shaped up really nicely. That would have been very hard to replace, so I was really happy with that.

SD: The other thing that Matt ran into that was difficult was that the bell flare was [and still is] very delicate and had many cracks in it. And there were also eleven cracks in the bottom bow. As you know, over the years, people got the brainiac idea of jumping in the bell, putting additional pressure on the bottom bow, which is probably why more and more cracks formed.

Photo 12 - Jonathan Detwiler trying out the horn with the new lead pipe. (Dave Detwiler)

MW: Those I was able to braze up. My fantasy was that, after a patina had formed over six months or more, I wanted people to look at the tuba and not realize that it had been worked on. That was the goal. But the bell flare was the major nightmare. It turned out to be ridiculously thin, probably from a lot of prior repairs, and I tried to stay away from patching it. Most of the cracks I was able to braze up. And the bell rim, because it was so mangled, took Evan and I two days to get back into shape, because we were trying to salvage the original metal.

DD: What about the huge valves? Any problems there?

SD: Originally, we were going to have the valves redone. We assumed they would be in worse shape than they were. So, I reached out to a friend of mine, Pat Hund, who used to run the Schilke factory, and he said, "Steve, I advise you not to redo them. Because if you lose those valves on the machine, they're done for." And then I called another good friend, Robb Stewart, who has done a tremendous amount of restorations, and he said, "Due to the size of that instrument, even when you redo the valves, you're not going to notice any difference. If I were you, I would not do them." And, truthfully, we did a compression test, and they weren't that bad.

MW: Besides, how much time do you think the valves actually got used over the years? There wasn't that much wear on them. I mean, how many performances of "The Flight of the Bumblebee" do you think got played on them?!

Photo 13 - Vladimir's custom mouthpiece, compared to a standard one. (Dave Detwiler)

SD: But we did take off those crazy levers that someone soldered onto the valves at some point, to help with reaching them while you played (see photo 11). And we solved that problem with Matt creating a special ninety-degree extension to the lead pipe, which allows for easy access to directly pushing down the valves (see photo 12).

DD: Did the restoration take longer than you originally imagined?

SD: Well, before the horn arrived, we imagined what we were going to do, but once we got it here, we had to rethink everything. And once we got pieces of it apart, we realized that we had to adjust our approach, because things wouldn't work as originally planned.

MW: It's like working on a battleship-everything takes so much longer than working on a destroyer, which is much smaller. You don't realize how much bigger the headache is going to be until you actually get into it. You think, "Oh, I can roll out a tuba bell in this amount of time," but no I can't when the bell is this big! Or you look at a branch and think, "I'll have this done in half a day." But not in this case!

Photo 14 - Matt and Steve upon completing the restoration. (Dave Detwiler)

DD: But even still, you got the work done on time.

SD: Well, that's because Matthew wanted it outta here! [Laughter!]

DD: How does the tuba play now?

SD: Much better than it has in years! However, previous players struggled with the fingerings, in part, because the instrument was made in high pitch. But, as we talked about, Matthew has made that ninety-degree extension to the lead pipe, which not only helps with the ergonomics of playing the horn, but also brings it down in pitch, and provides some resistance to be able to center the tone.

DD: And what about that huge mouthpiece I saw?

SD: That was Vladimir's idea, as he wanted to contribute something himself. So, I had him build a proportionally correct mouthpiece for that giant tuba, regardless of whether anyone is able to play it-which they aren't! (see photo 13). But Matthew's extension to the lead pipe is designed for a regular sized tuba mouthpiece, and, as you discovered earlier, it plays really well!

DD: One last question: Matt, what are you most proud of?

MW: [Long pause, as he stares at the floor, and then sighs.]

SD: I'll answer that for him, because Matt tends to be very modest. He has done what very few people have done. He might never say that to you, as he doesn't like to be in the limelight, but Matthew Walters repaired the Harvard Tuba. That's the bottom line. He was scared at the beginning. As we discussed early on, it's like you want to do it, but you also don't want to do it. So, what he's proud of, I think, is that it's done! Now, he'll say that it doesn't look like one of his normal restorations, but our hands were tied on a lot of stuff, as it was more a conservation than a full restoration.

MW: In my mind, I always wish that whatever I'm working on would come out perfect. So, the only part that actually, knowing how bad it was, came out perfect was that second valve slide crook. I'm very proud of that, I have to say.

SD: The other thing, if you really think about it, is that this instrument has not been totally disassembled since being built by F. Besson & Co. in 1889 for the Paris Exposition. Now, for years to come, while this giant tuba sits proudly in the corner of the Harvard Band room, people will learn that Matthew Walters of Dillon Music restored it in 2019 (see photo 14). He is now part of the history of this amazing instrument, joining the likes of Marthe Fontaine-Besson, Carl Fischer, Patrick Gilmore, the Harvard Band, and Sam Pilafian.

DD: And I don't know if you guys are aware of this, but after my extensive research on the handful of giant tubas that still exist, the Harvard Tuba is now confirmed as the world's largest fully functional tuba that can be played by one person. Thanks so much for the great work you did in restoring this colossal treasure to its former glory!

Dave Detwiler is part of the pastoral team of LCBC ("Lives Changed By Christ"), a multi-site church in southeastern Pennsylvania. He is also a longtime tuba player who gets excited about the history of this often-maligned instrument. He can be reached at tubapastor@gmail.com.

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