A Mighty Wind!

(The following article first appeared in 'The Times' on 27th July 2007)

Tomorrow is Brass Day at the Proms. For me that evokes a world of memories. Nearly every Saturday and Sunday of my boyhood was a brass day, one way or another. For most of my teenage years I played in the local band. I had little choice. My dad was the conductor. My uncle played first trombone.

A trombone was thrust into my hands as soon as my arms were long enough to push the slide to seventh position. Indeed, for most of my early life my tongue was more adept at articulating semiquavers through a metal tube than at turning thought into speech. And the first proper jacket I owned, apart from my school blazer, was one of our band’s embarrassingly distinctive maroon tunics with black suede lapels and gold-braided cuffs, which looked as if washed in scrambled egg.

Brass bands were, and still are, like that. The skills, traditions, mythology, instruments and uniforms are passed down the generations. They are tightly knit musical entities that seem to flourish best in communities that are themselves tightly knit. The Salvation Army is one great bastion of the tradition. The tough industrial heartlands of northern England and South Wales are another. For generations, men coming off shifts in the collieries, mills, shipyards and steelworks would have a quick scrub in the tub, pick up their cornet and head for the village bandroom for two hours of ferociously demanding practice – followed, as night follows day, by two hours of restorative refreshment in the boozer.

Rivalry between bands was, and is, intense. Some of the regional and national contests I took part in as a teenager – with 15 or 20 bands each playing the same “test piece”, knowing that a single fluffed note might make the difference between glory and ignominy – remain the most nerve-racking experiences of my life.

But the camaraderie is just as powerful. Brass bands inhabit a musical world all their own. First oddity: all the instruments (except bass trombone) play in the treble clef, whatever their pitch. The idea is that players can easily switch from soprano cornet to double-B flat tuba (fattest and deepest member of the brass family) in a trice – since the fingering and notation is the same, whatever the instrument.

And the instruments themselves are different from their cousins in the symphony orchestra. No trumpets and French horns, but cornets and assorted ranks of mini-tubas historically called “saxhorns” (although in modern bands known simply as tenor horns and baritones), because they were invented by Adolphe Sax, the 19th-century Belgian who also gave us the saxophone.

Then there’s the unique repertoire. True, it has diversified immensely in recent years. Such avant-garde luminaries as Hans Werner Henze and Harrison Birtwistle have written for the medium, and one ensemble [the Fairey Band] even made a famous excursion into acid-house music. But it’s still rare for a brass-band concert not to contain at least one “air and variations” piece designed to show off the virtuosity of the principal cornet or euphonium player. The sheer technical brilliance taken as the norm in the brass-band world is astonishing. In 30 years of reviewing professional concerts I have rarely heard anything to match it.

Brass bands also play in unexpected places and in all climes. That, too, intensifies the camaraderie. We raised funds for the band kitty by performing Sunday-afternoon concerts in local parks, sheet music anchored by stout clothes pegs, gales and rain usually lashing the deckchairs around the bandstand (the council didn’t give you the fee unless you played – whatever the weather). It was surreal, but also character-forming. If you can negotiate the second trombone part of Holst’s Moorside Suite with your part disintegrating to a papier-mâché pulp, musical challenges in later life hold few fears.

Nothing changes in that respect. Last year I attended the Brunel celebrations by the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol. As five local bands started to play Tchaikovsky’s 1812, the heavens opened. Their uniforms, music and instruments were sodden. But they didn’t miss a beat.

In other respects, however, the world in which brass bands operate has changed beyond recognition. The mills and mines have gone. Youngsters drift away from the old communities to find work. And where once the brass band was the only show in town, now there are a thousand less demanding ways for people to spend their leisure time.

Yet, miraculously, the bands live on – stripped of their social context, but not their indomitable pride [...] Brass bands today are socially far more diverse than they once were. Even soft southerners, middle-class people, women and teetotallers are allowed to play in them. But their essential sound – as capable of exquisite lyricism or tender wistfulness as of spine-shaking exuberance – is unchanged. That’s as it should be. It’s woven into the quintessential fabric of Britain.

 Richard Morrison