Prodigy, 21, wins coveted tuba job

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It was 9:30 on a Saturday night and Carol Jantsch was at an ultimate Frisbee tournament when her cell phone rang with an audition invitation from the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of America's finest symphonies.

Almost one year later, after beating out 194 other musicians during an arduous tryout process, the 21-year-old University of Michigan senior is the first woman — and perhaps the youngest person ever — to earn a tuba seat with a top-five U.S. symphony.

"This is no surprise for us," said Michael Haithcock, Michigan's director of bands. "Over four years, we've just been accustomed to Carol's depth of talent."

The soft-spoken Jantsch, daughter of an emergency-room physician and a vocal-music instructor, said her parents unwittingly started her tuba career when they forced her to take piano lessons at age 6.

It didn't take long for her mother, Nancy, who teaches at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to hear her daughter's talent: "She could make the simplest stuff sound very musical."

Carol Jantsch became interested in low brass when she was 9 at an arts camp. She picked up a euphonium, the tuba's smaller cousin, and could play it immediately.

"I always knew I was sort of ahead of the game," Jantsch said.

She began playing consistently in elementary school and started to dabble in tuba in seventh grade. When she enrolled at the Interlochen Arts Academy, a boarding high school for talented artists near Traverse City, Mich., she auditioned against two upperclassmen for first chair in the top band.

"She just wasted them," recalled her instructor, Tom Riccobono.

Interlochen helped her grow socially, Riccobono said. Instructors marveled at her math skills, and she discovered ultimate Frisbee, a game similar to football.

Although she plays an instrument normally reserved for men due to their larger lung capacity, tuba professors say it doesn't matter.

"You still have to be efficient," said Don Harry, associate professor of tuba at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. "She's the most efficient person, probably on the planet."

She won a seat in Michigan's top symphony band, one of only two or three freshmen to do so. Tuba instructor Fritz Kaenzig recalled that in Jantsch's first studio class, she played a difficult sonata from memory.

"All the graduate students kind of looked at each other and rolled their eyes and said 'Oh, no,' " he said.