CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The inventive Ronald Bishop, principal tubist of the

for 38 years, sometimes made his instrument warble, growl, screech, wail or set off a nearby tam-tam. He also stuffed a tambourine inside the mighty tuba for a buzzing accompaniment.

The 78-year-old Bentleyville resident died Thursday, July 25, at the Weils of Bainbridge from complications of myeloma and leukemia.

“Ronald Bishop is a performer with a flair for the ridiculous,” Plain Dealer critic Wilma Salisbury wrote in 1973 about a concert at the Jewish Community Center. “The performer, besides playing his instrument normally, sings, screams, barks, hiccoughs, slaps the mouthpiece, tickles the bell, taps a tam-tam and strikes a tambourine. At one point, Bishop turns the tuba sideways and aims the bell toward a suspended tam-tam to excite sympathetic vibrations…. The performance by Bishop was an astonishing tour de force.”

Seventeen years later, Bishop and Salisbury were at it again. Bishop performed at Case Western Reserve University with Epicycle, a contemporary group, and Salisbury wrote, “The expressive performance by Bishop, principal tubist of the Cleveland Orchestra, was as astonishing as a dangerous circus act.”

Robert Finn, another Plain Dealer critic, praised a somewhat more serious solo at Blossom Music Center in 1986. “Bishop certainly blew up a storm in the piece, managing rapid virtuoso passages with skill and even making his elephantine instrument sing here and there.”

The slight Bishop liked to call his hefty instrument a rain-catcher. It was too big to haul on tours, so he had to master a new model on each stop.

He designed a unique attachment to correct the instrument’s notoriously temperamental pitch. “It sits on his gold-plated tuba, looking like something for which your neighborhood plumber would charge you $35,” Finn wrote in 1980, back when neighborhood plumbers and $35 charges were still common.

Richard Stout, an Orchestra trombonist, said, “He was a wonderfully charismatic person with a deep, low, tuba-like voice. He treated every piece of music with the utmost respect.”

Bishop was raised in Rochester, N.Y. At 7, he wanted to play the trombone but was too small to slide it all the way out. So a teacher handed him a baby tuba instead.

“Children are attracted to visual things, and I was attracted to that big, shiny brass instrument,” he later said in the Orchestra’s program notes. He began to tote it to lessons in a little red wagon.

He earned a performer’s certificate and a bachelor’s degree in music education at his hometown’s prestigious Eastman School of Music. He also captained the University of Rochester swim team and won a state diving championship. “I often came to class with frozen hair,” he recalled.

For three years, Bishop toured the nation, Europe and the Far East with the U.S. Army Field Band. In just nine months, he earned a master’s in music education at the University of Illinois.

He was going to teach high school music but won an audition for the Buffalo Philharmonic. Then he followed its music director to the San Francisco Symphony. He also joined the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and met Marie Milburn, a violinist and administrative assistant from Victoria, British Columbia. They married in 1965.

A year later, the Bishops discovered Ruxton Island by canoe off the province’s West Coast. In 1967, they built a cedar cabin on top of a big rock there, with no electricity or plumbing. They visited it every summer until 2013 and never modernized it.

In 1967, George Szell hired Bishop to replace Chester Roberts as Cleveland’s principal tubist. A lawsuit ensued in San Francisco, where the Musicians Union tried to reserve Bishop’s old job for one of its current members. Instead, oddly enough, the Symphony hired Roberts.

Bishop proved lively company for Clevelanders. Busing through Australia on tour, Bishop once spent 40 minutes playing the didjeridu, an indigenous instrument that makes a low, monotonous wail. “Some of my colleagues were ready to kill me,” he told The Plain Dealer in 1980. “Others said it made the ride bearable.”

Over the years, Bishop taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Oberlin Conservatory and Baldwin-Wallace College. He visited many lower schools, too, playing “Tubby the Tuba” and performing on conch shells, buffalo horns, cardboard tubes and vacuum cleaner hoses. In 1998, he joined the Orchestra’s new Learning Through Music program in Cleveland elementary schools.

He performed with many different groups, including Performers and Artists for Nuclear Disarmament. He won Grammy awards with a couple, including the comical PDQ Bach. He played the National Anthem with five Orchestra colleagues at Jacobs Field during the baseball playoffs of 1997. He edited and wrote for professional journals.

He retired from the Orchestra in 2005 but kept performing with the Heights Chamber Orchestra and the NEOTuba Quartet.

He liked to canoe, hike and golf at Auburn Springs. He once crewed on a salmon troller in the Pacific.

The Bishops’ only child, Christopher, became a sound technician and won an Emmy for a video featuring Barbra Streisand.

Bishop’s ashes will be scattered on Ruxton Island.

Ronald Taylor Bishop





1934-2013

Survivors: Wife, the former Marie Elizabeth Milburn; son, Christopher, of Boca Raton, Fla.; a granddaughter and a brother.

Memorial event: To be announced.¶

Arrangements: Stroud-Lawrence Funeral Home.