Sergeant First Class and tubist Scott Devereaux, who performs this August at the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival.
It might be the first-ever tuba world premiere on the North Shore.
Chamber music premieres with tuba aren’t that common, but Sergeant First Class Scott Devereaux isn’t a common tuba player anyway.
Devereaux joins four string players this week for a world premiere of Eric Ewazen’s tuba quintet, the highlight of this summer’s Newburyport Chamber Music Festival.
Devereaux, a member of the U.S. Army Field Band since 2014, is the star performer of this summer’s NCMF, which runs through Aug. 15. Last year’s festival was limited because of the pandemic to “quartet caroling,” as director David Yang called it, with musicians strolling around various neighborhoods to perform outdoors.
This year NCMF—founded two decades ago by Yang—returns with its usual mix of house concerts, family events and open rehearsals. Concerts are outdoors, or in smaller, intimate settings.
Devereaux performs with the festival quartet—“tuba players almost never get to collaborate with strings,” he says—and solo, in a number of works that “combine to push the tuba in a lot of different ways.”
He’s featured in four programs, playing Ewazen’s quintet three times, and works by Penderecki, Rimsky-Korsakov, Vivaldi and Bach as well. Ewazen will also appear at the festival, discussing his premiere before each of its performances Aug. 13–15.
“Eric has a unique voice,” Devereaux says of Ewazen, a longtime Juilliard faculty member, and frequent composer of music for brass. “It suits my instrument.
“The work has three typical movements, and my personal favorite is the second,” Devereaux says. “It has this beautiful melody, and it really captures the lyric side of the tuba. People don’t think of the tuba as lyrical. I personally identified most with that movement.
“David (Yang) wanted to showcase my instrument,” he says, “and we came up with programs that are tough, and that push the range. He asked me to include ‘Flight of the Bumblebee,’ and ‘Winter’ from Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’—things that would be challenging even on string instruments.
“The tuba can be narrowly viewed by the wider public. People don’t expect it to do some things.”
Devereaux’s career—he studied at Michigan, and then took an artist’s diploma at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia—was hardly traditional, or expected.
“When I was younger, I didn’t see myself in the military,” he says, “but now I see it as my career. It’s not straight down the middle of the classical music path, but I’ve been in the band for almost eight years, and it’s a diverse experience.
“I’ve played on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and in Navajo Nation,” he says. “We play in all the great halls of the country. We have a concert-centric mission—almost 100 concerts a year. We do three major tours, and I still can come to events like Newburyport and do some freelancing.
“It’s enabled me to do a lot of things,” Devereaux says, “and it’s one of the most secure jobs a musician can have. That was pointed out over the past year, when we couldn’t perform live at all. But we have been steadily working anyway, trying to figure out how to fulfill our mission.”
The Newburyport Chamber Music Festival runs through Aug. 15 at various locations. For tickets and information visit newburyportchambermusic.org or call 978 701-4914.
Keith Powers covers music and the arts for Gannett New England, Leonore Overture and Opera News. Follow @PowersKeith; email to keithmichaelpowers@gmail.com.