Britain's 5600 Brass Bands Are Country's Largest Amateur Movement

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 15116, 27 October 1949, Page 5

Britain's 5600 Brass Bands Are Country's Largest Amateur Movement

Music And Musicians

In 1816, in Queen’s Head —a little village 1.100 ft. above sea level in the West Riding 1 of Yorkshire —there was a small brass and reed hand in which John Poster played the horn. After entering the worsted business at 21, John built his first mill, in 1835, on the site of a farm av Black Dyke. While the affairs of John Foster and Son prospered, those of the village band did not, until in 1855 the Fosters’ rescued il by associating it directly with their mills, thus originating the Black Dyke Mills Band, whose distinguished and unbroken career since then has placed it in the forefront among Britain’s brass hands todav.

Conditions were ripe, therefore, for the evolution of the brass band movement, and enthusiasm for this form of music-making spread throughout the country from the North and Midlands which had cradled it.

This was symptomatic of a general development throughout the North and Midlands, reflecting both the growing awareness among industrialists of the value of music as a recreation for their employees, and the working man’s own need of a creative, rewarding outlet in harmony with his workmates. Today, the estimated totals of brass bands in the country despite two world wars, vary between five and six thousand and they constitute the largest amateur music-making movement in the country. Significantly, together with the numerous “Town”, “Borough”, “Public Subscription” bands, there are today many trade-associated bands which form —like Black Dyke Mills —an unbroken link with the movement’s earliest days. Interwoven with this history is the development and popularity of the brass band contest, which for over a century has had a powerful attraction for bandsmen and audience alike.

The first contest of which records are available took place at Burton Constable, near Hull, in 1845. Five bands each limited to twelve players competed: drums were prohibited and ballot decided the order of playing. The first of an interrupted series of brass band contests was held in 1853, at Belle Vue, Manchester.

London came into the picture when a national contest was staged at the Crystal Palace in 18G0. It has kept its place consistently as a centre of national contesting since 1900 when the annual National Band Festival at the Crystal Palace was founded. In the first year, 29 bands entered for three graded contests, but the series grew both in scope and entries up to 1938.

regular in having four contrasted movements, is a setting of fourteen poems on cr near the subject of spring. Most of them are seventeenth or eighteenth century, but one is by Britten’s contemporary and former collaborator, W. H. Auden. The composer’s treatment of some of the pcems will strike some listeners as curious and even capricious; but out of the diversity of his poetic material, Britten has fashioned a solid and stirring whole. At the end comes a surprise, worked with a freshness and ingenuity that may stand as typical of the composer: piercing the adult choir, the boys are heard singing “Summer is icumen in” to its famous 13thcentury melody.