- My name is Elihu Scott Conant-Haque.

I go to the Waldorf School of Saratoga Springs and I play the tuba.

(instrumental music) The piece I play today is called the Carnival in Venice.

It's a variation on a traditional melody which describes the Carnival in Venice in the Renaissance time.

And it goes through various variations, triple time, duple time and such things.

And it's played on many instruments.

Tuba perhaps is the most unlikely of all of them.

(instrumental music) What I noticed about the piece is that many of the musicians who play it want to do it just to show off how incredibly fast they can play it.

But I thought there were actually some nice, pretty parts in it that have nice melodies.

And I wanted to bring that out.

And I figured what better way to bring out the nice melodies in a piece, than to learn the piece and play it for people.

(instrumental music) The greatest difficulty is keeping your mind and your fingers in sync with one another because on a brass instrument if you can't hear and expect the note, you can't play it.

It's very intuitive like that.

So you have to make sure your mind is expecting the next note, but your fingers memorize the muscle pattern and very easily rush ahead.

I know that's sort of the classic difficulty of hard fast pieces, but it especially comes up in this case.

(instrumental music) The music teacher at my school, Jacquelyn Burke nominated me to perform.

I'd love to thank my tuba teacher, Michael Midenbower who has given me almost all of the tuba wisdom on which I draw to practice and to perform and has generally gotten me to a level of musicianship, such that playing is fun and expressive and no longer technically stressful or demanding (instrumental music)