Omg as a tuba player this is sooooo relatable!!!! And then right after you play you have another 40 measure rest followed by a 10 measure rest and and 80 measure rest and you finally come back in at the end to play some arbitrary notes
Used to play tuba in highschool and I was thankful that like 90% of the music we played had the tubas actually doing stuff. Most of the time it was a background rhythm, but decently often we’d get to play something interesting ourselves or with the rest of the low brass. Though for that 10%, I feel your pain
This is a similar thing for oboes it just happens a little less and it’s compensated by actually getting the melody and even some solos a lot more often than Tubas. And I’m pretty sure it’s a similar thing for Piccolos
Last year I was in all-district honor band and our whole tuba section had a song we literally nicknamed 'naptime' for this exact reason, we had 7 notes the whole song. Percussion also had like one cymbal roll near the end I think "O Magnum Mysterium" is what it's called
When I write for tuba I always make sure to include a few bars of the melody in the tuba and low reed section because as a Bari sax and bassoon player I know the struggle bassoon gets more melody chances but the other lows don’t so I always include stuff for them
When i played tuba in highschool, i trained myself to semi-nap in band, but still somewhat be listening so that I don't miss when I have to come in/play with the band. Also, if we played the piece enough/if it was simple enough to memorize, I would also just close my eyes and "rest" while playing. It also helped that we were given comfy/soft chairs to sit on instead of the hard plastic chairs that everyone else had to sit on.
I had the opposite problem playing Tuba back in the day: Nobody had problems with 4 hour practice sessions because everybody got their breaks. Except every playthrough of any part began with "I want to hear... [a selection of instruments] and tuba." Always "and tuba". No exceptions.
Honestly just a step down playing baritone I didn’t really experience this….though I was the singular low brass player, save for MAYBE the bass clarinet if you stretch the definition
