Sleepers Awake! or There are Three of Us in This Marriage
(The British Bandsman - 2006) A certain kerfuffle ensued after the announcement of the National Contest Test Piece. Headbangers and paddywhackers of all stripes said their piece. I poured my pint of oil on the burning waters in order to calm things down and gradually quiet returned....
The choice of Berlioz’s ‘Judges of the Secret Court’ for the National Finals has sent up a cloud of dust, or should I say, sent up this year’s cloud of dust. There has to be a cloud to every year’s Nationals and this is the particular one for 2006. Immediately upon announcement of the chosen Championship Section piece the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth began and the cry went up ‘All is lost! A dodgy arrangement of a duff overture by an overrated dead composer has been chosen by the Appalling Three otherwise known as the Panel.’ But, some of a different persuasion said ‘Excellent!’ but then spoilt it by adding uncharitably … ‘What went right for a change?’ Turn a silver lining inside out and faster than prestissimo you have a cloud.
But … Relax! These few words are not about contesting as such. There are none of the usual solutions that are dead on arrival before they hit the page. Into the long grass with that stuff! I am writing about my favourite subject: Music. The stuff we perform, play, listen to, hear, and one or two people write. The stuff that is sometimes too difficult to play, or too easy … sometimes both at the same time … or too boring or too hard to understand, or perhaps it is just that we are too dim to pay attention or too lazy to reconsider our tired old ideas.
It is quietly amusing to see the contest pendulum swing from a period of exclusively ‘original’ music towards the occasional inclusion of arrangements. Original? A misnomer if ever I read one: most composed music is the product of some kind of recycling, re-thinking process or neat pastiche, whether from oneself or from others, and how could it be otherwise? Composers have to work with what their forbears pass on to them, like the rest of humanity does. (Any piece of wholly original musical work would necessarily be incomprehensible! We wouldn’t know where or how to start: we wouldn’t have any sort of handle on it.)
When I say ‘amusing’ it is just that, over the years, the many pompous and self-serving pronouncements that have been issued against arrangements are now starting to be ignored by events. Arranged music even takes up increasing parts of Brass Band Festivals that used to be given over to entirely to compositions. Would I be wrong to guess that music composed for brass band now makes up less than 10% of most day-to-day concert programmes? Well known arrangers such as Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Dvořák, R Strauss, etc., composed as well. (For those who don’t do irony, that’s a joke.) I can remember a time when highbrow classical music opinion was scathing about competition in music, especially in banding. Today it has become almost the only way into classical music performance for the aspiring soloist or conductor.
Historically, as armies march on their stomachs, so banding marches on its arrangements. To me, this change towards a more even-handed contesting balance with arrangements seems very sensible from many angles, not least from the audience’s point of view. In day-to-day band concert programmes the scales have tipped much too far in favour of arrangements: ‘original’ music clings on by its toenails. Added to which the musical quality of a great deal of the arranged music being used in concerts and broadcasts seems now very poor indeed.
While wondering how to respond to the Editor’s invitation to write something for the BB, I looked up some of my programme notes from the past, and found one for a concert in Shropshire given around the start of the nineties. It contained only one arranged piece, lasting six minutes! Every other piece, in a very full concert, was composed. It was common for me in those days to give 50/50 composed/arranged programmes, and rarely if ever to drop below 25%. Whether composed or arranged, the tide is flowing towards ever more sweet-toothed candy floss. Several years ago I wrote in my book The Trumpet that if we are what we eat, musically we are what we listen to. Not sad-but-true, but sad-but-truer-every-day.
The three of us in this marriage are the music writer, the performer and the listener. And of the three, the music is the only thing that we cannot do without. It is commonly heard that contesting is the lifeblood of banding. Nonsense! Music is the lifeblood of banding. Contesting just sends the blood racing round the system very fast every couple of months. It’s a thrill that some find addictive, but like most addictions it is bought at a price. And of the three, music is the least discussed subject of all in banding, unless of course there’s a chance of a good grumble.
So what is it that makes music writers … composers and arrangers … important to banding? It may seem extraordinarily obvious to say it, on a par with ‘the sky is above and the earth below’, but in the light of the blatantly illegal and continuing downloading and photocopying of music, it will have to be repeated till understood: no writers = no music. Nothing to play. Nothing to listen to. Nowhere to go to listen, meet and socialise. NOTHING!
Bands need writers and above all composers. Those few high quality composers, who like what they hear, come back time and time again and significantly add to banding’s most valuable repertoire, but whose main careers also lie outside banding, should be tremendously welcomed and encouraged. But what in reality often happens? More than a few of those already eminent composers have been insulted by players and conductors who are hopelessly ignorant in mind and manners. John McCabe’s Images, set for the Areas about twenty years ago, provoked some shameful responses from many who should have known better. More recently Judith Bingham received hate mail and abusive phone calls. Unbelievable? Unfortunately no. Forgiveable? Positively no. On another tack, Philip Sparke, after judging at a major contest, was insultingly taken to task by a website correspondent, who, without a backward glance, equated the quality of his own judgement with that of Philip’s.
This kind of behaviour drives away musicians of high value at a time when banding needs them more than ever. Musicians of quality rarely need banding: they carry on their core work elsewhere. If they are involved with banding it is because they choose to be, not because they have to be. I know of one composer … he’s been around the block, knows what he’s doing … who is now unwilling to compose music for contest use. He doesn’t want the abuse that too often goes with the territory.
In the matter of repertoire it seems true to many people that the banding wagon is veering or even careering way off the track in concert programmes. Why? Is the banding audience less discerning these days, or are the conductors and bands too lazy to prepare the tougher repertoire? If either of these questions strike home, the next one inevitably has to be ‘Is this just a British problem, or common throughout the banding world?’ Of the non-British bands that I occasionally conduct, the standard is rising all the time, the programmes are often challenging (to listen to and to perform) and the levels of imagination going into the programmes are impressive indeed. That used to be the case here. Are the rising levels and the repertoire quality somehow connected? If so, what about the reverse?
As now a somewhat distant observer of banding, being only an occasional conducting guest, my comments may seem a little awry at times. I depend on websites, the occasional sight of a magazine or what contacts tell me. I find it all rather confusing, as yards of full fat hype alternate with rare but jarringly discordant notes e.g. ‘The Registry warns’ on the state of banding personnel … attendances at rehearsal, the relaxing of rules to allow the pretence of normality to be preserved. What is one to think? ‘Something Must Be Done!’ keeps cropping up in website reader’s letters columns. Which in my experience means that ‘Nothing Has Been Done!’ ‘Nothing’ goes nowhere without its sidekick ‘Nothing-Will-Be-Done-If-It-Hasn’t –Been-Done_Already!’ ‘Something’ is never going to arrive as a gilt-edged, gift wrapped, chauffeur-delivered, this-side-up chance. If banding’s thin trickle of decent composers and arrangers, both young and old, are not fed and watered by both banding’s grass roots and tall trees, they will go away and never come back. Why bother? ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new’ said the poet. Music writers will go where they are wanted. The good young ones need to eat and bring up families just like conductors and cornet players, and in today’s parlance ‘enjoy the finer things of life!’ Sleepers awake!
Everyone will have to help, otherwise banding will gradually weaken beyond recovery. Conductors and cornet players … very important people in their way … will have to choose better music for their concerts, lead audiences towards higher musical ground and stop playing solos that only the brain dead, or other cornettists can enjoy. Euphoniumists (and their tame composers) … extraordinarily important people who require a cadenza every five minutes during every test piece … will have to consider a global ban on exploration of their instrument’s lower intestines. That is not where The Lost Chord is hiding! I know where it is and it is not in any euphonium yet made.
I digress! What seems to have happened is that ‘original’ music has been left almost exclusively to ‘the contest’ to present to the public, but now contests seem to be saying ‘Hold on a moment! Why should we be exclusively lumbered with this duty, when we need audiences as much as anyone else? Our audiences are not guaranteed any more than yours!’ Which is probably where the National is at the moment. The contest audience may think it has paid for its tummy to be tickled but instead gets an invigorating roll in the snow followed by something very dangerous with birch twigs! Be brave. It might be good for you!
Which brings up another question: what about composers’ responsibilities? Today’s musical language music often lacks a full range of expression to inspire and develop bands, players and conductors. If today’s composers cannot or will not supply it why not return to arrangements of some of the finer composers? Good phrasing and a beautiful sound can only be developed if the music in front of the player is of the right type. Are today’s composers filling the bill? Eric Ball said that he only wrote pastiche, yet he remains an impeccable role model for the brass band composer. He knew what made bands sound good and what made players feel good and what made audiences feel satisfied. Humility not hype. Consider a very different case: Heaton’s Contest Music is apparently rated by players as the best-ever contest piece. It’s contains enough originality to be called original. It is not pastiche. On the face of it, the work is quite severe in a rather Germanic fashion. It is emphatically not a crowd-pleaser, and yet it is enormously appreciated, year after year. Wilfred Heaton dedicated music to Eric Ball, and fully appreciated him, while understanding the differences between them.
So what we are in fact talking about is quality. Quality arrangements do what they have always done: keep the unprivileged in touch with hints of the best of the past, and allow listeners and players in all social or personal positions to enjoy some of music’s riches otherwise not available to them. Quality arrangers and composers reshape, re-think, creatively re-arrange previous material into new forms with new uses. Direct arrangements allow banding’s young musicians a little contact with the greatest that has been thought or said in music. At a time when almost all music that is written is available on demand, instantly, there is less knowledge of musical history among the young than at any time in my lifetime. With tenth rate rubbish pumped out at every door on today’s street, there is a likelihood that the heritage of our best music will never be heard or assimilated by the young in comparison to those of us who were lucky enough to have taken in great music at a young age. Is that not important? There is no phoney war between arranged and original music: you can have both. Arranged music in banding has the advantage over composed simply because the music is already vaguely known from elsewhere. There need be no drawing of lines in the sand, pistols at dawn or any other nonsense. In music you can have it all if you put in the time and the trouble.
You can also have nothing if conductors and performers are generally too idle or uncaring to make the effort to encourage composers and arrangers. Composition must be encouraged on a daily basis and not as a token effort with piddly little composers’ competitions. Is it still true that organisers of most British events still can’t organise a warm-up at a contest? If so, encouraging the bands in their Associations to Nurture a Composer Today will be a day-trip to the moon in comparison. For the moment that particular buck will have to stop with the bands and their conductors. Then, Band Secretaries, send in a programme to the Performing Rights Society so that these young writers can get their 17 pence for that two-minute Fanfare.
Returning to the Royal Albert Hall and the National Contest, Ian Porthouse commented recently in the British Bandsman that what matters is getting the right result. That is, whether the Berlioz/Wright ‘Judges’ is a good or bad arrangement of a poor/good piece doesn’t matter, it will get a good result. (For what it is worth Berlioz can do no wrong for me … and there must be a better way to arrange this piece.) The excitement of each year’s piece, for the players and the audience is what matters so that a ticket for the National again becomes the most prized ticket of the year. Ian’s emphasis is too narrow for my taste and seems to leave no room for responsibility towards the music and the audience.
But, on the other hand, why should the responsibility for looking after ‘original’ music be that of the National or any other contest? It’s a CONTEST. That is how it is advertised, not as a be-nice-to-a-composer-today charity event. Should the social engineering element come into it at all, or be allowed to dominate as it sometimes does? Contests have ended up as almost the only purveyor of substantial new music. Apart from anything else, is it not dishonest to take the money from the public, then not put on the best contest possible? Should it not be as thrilling, spine tingling, nerve jangling, irresistible contest event as possible? And don’t composers have the duty to write contest works (when being commissioned for that purpose) that are testing to play and but also enjoyable on the day for the audience which keeps the event (and the composers and prizewinners) in the black? Have some modern composers become too big for their boots, almost claiming that their inspiration gives them some kind of Third Amendment freedom from responsibility for anything as unfashionable or low rent as enjoyment?
So enjoy the unique inspirations of Hector Berlioz at the RAH. He was grumbled about massively during his lifetime by his Parisian friends and back-stabbers alike. And guess what? The arrangements of Berlioz’s overtures were grumbled about massively by many banders when introduced to banding 50 years ago. I suppose it is ‘just people’, but does it have to be? Anyway, be nice to your composers and arrangers. Without them there would be only silence. And in that case the best that could be hoped for would be a solo conductors’ contest, because, of course, they are silent too. Imagine the poses achieved, the stances struck, the left hand gestures deployed, the tortured foreheads achieved, the pirouettes completed. (Marks out of ten but I think an early 10 am draw would still be a disadvantage.) The younger slimmer ones could try fabulous leaps towards the audience for the cherry topping of the last chord, while those stars girthed more fully could riposte with mature and statesmanlike slow tempi. (The Leonard Bernstein prize for highest vertical jump followed by two-handed downbeat and the Wagner prize for most interesting air-drawing would be valuable minor prizes.) And finally, the Conducting of The Applause! The hall would be full for these moments, I guarantee.
Sorry, I digress again! Just got carried away by my silent imagination. Enjoy the sound of the music, the performances and the contest! And say “Thankyou!” politely to the composer and the arranger, please.
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