From Renaissance madrigals to Jazz improvisation: meet multi-instrumentalist Lewis Chinn

He’s played sousaphone in a nightclub, tin whistle in a ceilidh band, sung Renaissance madrigals in a cathedral, conducted Classical compositions, and picked up folk guitar. Lewis Chinn doesn’t confine himself to one genre or instrument. But how did he choose to specialise in the tuba? 

“As a kid, I always dreamt of playing a big instrument. When you’re a little boy, you just want to make a lot of noise. I really wanted to play the gong for some time. But my mum is a woodwind repairer and she occasionally gets brass instruments. I must have been five or six when she got a tuba come into the workshop. As soon as I saw it, I thought ‘that’s it, that’s what I’m going to play.’ Obviously I couldn’t pick it up for a few years because I was too small, but I started learning the tuba when I was eight and have stuck with it. I began on an old Salvation Army instrument and I used to have to sit on a pillow to reach the mouthpiece!”. 

Fast-forward several years and Lewis won three prestigious awards during his time at the Royal College of Music Junior Department. He started his undergraduate studies at RCM before transferring to Trinity Laban and completing his degree in Tuba. We discuss the instrument’s repertoire and his experience of performing it to an audience. “There’s a big misconception that tuba doesn’t have a lot of repertoire,” he says. “It just happens to be that much of its music is written by contemporary composers, people who aren’t necessarily big household names like Bach or Mendelssohn. This is nice because you get a more diverse portfolio of composers who’ve written for the instrument. When I’m performing something on the tuba, I’m always performing to fresh ears. Few people have heard of many of the pieces, maybe the odd bit of John Fletcher or Øystein Baadsvik. It’s great, you’re always introducing something new to the audience.” 

Among the most iconic works for tuba is Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto in F Minor. Lewis cites the composer’s music as his gateway into classical music as a child: “It’s a fantastic piece. I think his music is stunning, I still absolutely love it.” He is equally eager to challenge the view that few tuba pieces are written by women – it’s often claimed that Jennifer Glass’s Sonatina is the only tuba work by a female identifying composer. Glass also wrote an unaccompanied piece, Prelude Waltz & finale (“which is fantastic and pretty challenging”), but Lewis explains that “there’s loads of other really good music out there.” Judith Bingham’s “Der Spuk” springs to mind, “a really evocative solo tuba work, telling the story of a ghost”, as well as Janna Ross Hersey’s “Shatterdome”, a dark-electro piece for tuba with prerecorded electronic track. He also highlights Trinity Laban composer Polina Savicka’s piece for CYMBIOSIS called “where the lichens grow”. “It was really cool to go through the composition process with Polina,” Lewis says. “It’s a fun piece to play that really showcases the unique sonorities of tuba and vibraphone. There’s something very intangible and spacious about the work that I love.”

Speaking more generally, Lewis has a very broad music taste. He’s inspired by the music of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara – referencing his amazing orchestration – but also loves listening to pop, folk, rock, drum and bass. Experimenting with different ideas and styles is something Lewis has loved about his time at Trinity Laban. “From the get-go, I had a lot of freedom,” he says. “I could do whatever I wanted to. My teacher Les Neish – he’s amazing – lets me steer the path and helps me but doesn’t tell me ‘you need to do this, you need to do that’. He allows me to take the lead.

“Prior to applying, I’d met people from Trinity Laban and they all seemed really sound, really happy. Everyone is very enthusiastic and there’s always a lot going on. If you go up to anyone here and say ‘hey, I’ve got this mad idea, this weird project’, someone will always be like ‘yes, let’s do it’. No one will say ‘no, I have to go and practise my scales, that’ll be bad for my tone or orchestral sound’. Everyone here has got niche interests or a weird part of music that they’re interested in. It’s so exciting because it’s easy to find people to do projects with. Folk music has always been one of my hobbies, but there are so many people here who do it to a really high level. I’ve been able to learn so much by playing with them. They’ve taught me different tunes and I’ve played in ceilidh bands and learnt some guitar.”

Lewis is keen to highlight that this spirit of collective musicianship was central to his wellbeing and success. “Everyone wants to play all the time, it’s really vibrant. This is such a big reason for why I’ve really enjoyed Trinity Laban and done well. Everyone just loves music and performing, that’s all there is to it. There’s something so special about the community here.”

One of the first projects Lewis was involved in at Trinity Laban was a trombone quartet, in which they also sang and played Renaissance music on sackbuts. “It was really fun and the performances were pretty off the wall. We did the Carne Competition two years ago and walked in there with feathered hats and sackbuts, singing the music of Henry the Eighth.”

This year, Lewis returned to the Carne Competition with Amphion Brass. Having previously won the 2024 Philip Jones Brass Competition, the brass quintet were awarded runners-up. The members are all students at Trinity Laban and performed a beautifully varied programme, including Frank Bridge’s Lento (originally written for organ, but arranged by the group’s French horn player Jared Little), rag number That’s a Plenty, and Lewis’s own arrangement of traditional folk song Shenandoah.

CoLab has been a stand-out experience for Lewis. In his first year, he participated in a Klezmer project run by the celebrated Merlin Shepherd, exploring a musical tradition that was entirely new to him. He also performed the music from the film High Society, which involves jazz improvisation, a musical process he finds refreshing. This year, he took part in a project with Bruno Heinen, writing a piece based on Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. “It was so inspiring and felt really original. The performance was of such a high standard that I thought we could take the work on tour.”

Having finished his undergraduate degree, Lewis embarks on a career as a versatile freelance musician with a current focus on an ensemble he co-founded at Trinity Laban. In 2023, Lewis won Trinity Laban’s Gold Medal Competition and Audience Prize, with the adjudication commenting on the “enormous amounts of joy and exuberance [he brought] to his playing.” From this formed CYMBIOSIS, a tuba and percussion duo with Trinity Laban alum Meikah, who completed an undergraduate degree in Percussion and Drum Kit. “We write our own music, which is really nice,” says Lewis. “We’ve got a plan to self-publish some of that sheet music because I think there’s a market for small chamber groups, especially in institutions where people need to perform chamber music for an assessment and they’d rather not assemble a whole quintet or dectet. They can play with a percussionist instead.”

CYMBIOSIS head to Switzerland in October, performing at the Hans Erni Museum in Lucerne and then at the Palass Zofingen. “We’ll keep the duo going, write lots of music and get it off the ground. I’ve actually got rehearsal straight after this,” says Lewis. “We’ve done a couple of recordings that we’ll use as demos. It’s a really cool project and it’s something unique that only works with Meikah. He’s the most amazing musician. It’s really exciting that we write our own music and workshop it all the time, but we also spend a lot of our rehearsals talking about the philosophy of music and how it works.”

Outside of the duo, Lewis continues performing in different contexts and pursuing his passion for teaching. “This year, I’ve done a lot of projects which involve education outreach: going round schools and performing there. I’ve been doing a lot of teaching too – that’s something I want to do much more of next year. I really love it. I teach mostly brass and piano at the moment, but it would be nice to go into schools and do more projects.

I recently played in a reception class and corresponding SEN/D [special educational needs and/or disabilities] class in a London primary school. Just seeing the way that the children transformed when listening to the music was amazing! We played a few folk tunes and introduced them to different musical styles – I played them some low notes on the tuba. There was one kid who was beaming the whole way through. It was so sweet. Beforehand, he seemed to be having a difficult day, but as soon as the music started, he completely transformed. It was heart-melting! I’d love to have more experience in this sector and learn how to help children reach their full potential.”