The Christmas season rang in Downtown Crossing with a distinctive low note or, rather, 100 such low notes as just as many regional brass instrument players assembled for Boston’s annual TubaChristmas.

Low B flat, the lowest tone in music that is not just a grunt, is sounded in orchestras by the contrabassoon or the contrabass tuba. Beethoven used the big woodwind in his Ninth Symphony. Haydn in his ...

A young man sits alone in a room, a tuba on his lap, and blows it hard, huffing and puffing to play Snedecor’s Low Étude for Tuba Number 4. It’s a head-rattling piece in a profoundly low register — ...

Tuba, or not tuba? For the more than 80 low brass instrumentalists and the hundreds gathered at Valparaiso University’s Chapel of the Resurrection Sunday afternoon for the 14th annual TubaChristmas, ...