Whom Do You Think You Are?
(Brass Band World - 2004) But didn't I write another with much the same title back in 79, 25 years ago ? Yes, but this one is from the end of my banding career as a result of exactly the same request : to write something about the state of banding. I scored one or two in off the post in that first effort, and now, to my surprise, writing this note in 2008 I am leading comfortably by half-time, but not without a certain amount of abuse from the touchline....
“Well, what are you doing these days?” is the greeting I often get when I now meet a bander, as if I had been reported as being off-planet. To which I answer “Much the same as usual except without the contesting.” In fact I even went to a band concert recently just for the fun of it … yes, to listen … to hear Richard Evans and Grimethorpe. One of the Grimethorpe players expressed incredulity that I hadn’t got anything better to do with my Saturday night! But in spite of his warm Yorkshire welcome, a thoroughly enjoyable evening it was, the Band led by guest solo cornet Alan Morrison in his usual calm, sophisticated way. Apart from conducting, Richard gave a virtuoso silent-film style performance as the great speaker fretting at not being allowed to do the speaking. (There was a compère that night.) This cameo role itself was worth the entrance money!
A few weeks later I read a well argued, sensible letter from Alan in BBW about contesting. As long as I have known banding, its media have been continually full of comments about the state of contesting and banding in general. Initiatives to change things have come and gone, but nothing has happened. It was then that the inimitable figure of Richard popped into my mind to remind me of something that I had quite forgotten: an initiative he and I undertook many years ago.
Our long-ago-and-far-away initiative from the beginning of the nineties, had in fact tried to address some of the points Alan touched on in his letter. Namely, to create a situation where band players can have an input into the way banding runs …. not just the committees, the self-elected grandees, the entrepreneurs turning a buck … the actual players. Ever since I have been in banding there have been regular, impotent explosions of band-rage about how banding runs: they last just as long as it takes to recover from the pints of beer that inspire them. “Someone” … someone else, that is … “should do something about it!” Cynics say they’ve seen it all before. “There’ll be another one along next week,” they’ll say. (A brand new scheme has surfaced in the last few days, I am told.) Of course they are right, but why does nothing ever happen … or to be more accurate, why does something never happen? Well, Richard and I tried.
That’s the real problem. There’s me-and-you on the one hand and there’s banding on the other. It is like the street-lighting question. Everyone wants street-lighting for reasons too obvious to mention. Pay it out of taxes, we say. But if it can’t be paid out of taxes, will you pay for it yourself outside your house? No fear!
The initiative that Richard and I took was limited to England, because the other parts of the UK have their own arrangements, and uniquely England has no banding organisation, no national contest even. Our idea was to create a Forum, a means for discussion and decision, to bring about what players want for banding and from banding. It has to be both of those, for the reasons I mentioned in the previous paragraph. It was one of a number of ‘somethings’ that we undertook as a payback to banding itself, which had been good to us on the me-and-you level.
(On a marginal note, I am always pole-axed by the depressing and embarrassing question has to be asked: why are we (the English) so often good as individuals, but bad at managing? In sports only Woodward and England rugby has won anything significant in recent times. In football we have a poor team and poor Swedish manager. In the Premiership is it one or two English managers? The cricket team is managed by a Zimbabwean? The swimming team is managed by an Australian? The triumphant rowing team managed by …. a German! Not one of the three main party leaders is English. I could go on. I will: French, Welsh, Scots, Dutch, German kings, but no-one English on the throne since Harold or Aethelred the Unready … 1066 and all that! And now … only joking … a Scottish Government of occupation in Westminster?)
So, leaving behind the whole matter of how banding in England manages itself, what are the good things that need supporting and the strong words that need saying so that English banding does well, and not just ‘me and you’? Grassroots banding is very active and healthy. I don’t mean that it is easy, or a stroll in the park, but the lower section bands are doing it through self support and self help, not by handouts and sponsorships. It keeps going because people want it. They will still be there when the last ‘top’ band has turned off the lights and closed the door for the final time. But for now, they, the roots, could do with some nurturing and friendly help. To take just one idea: when a band ‘takes’ a promising young player from a lower section band, why not a transfer fee in the form of a concert for the band funds of the donor band by the beneficiary band … for all that work, and time and trouble educating and developing the young promising player?
Still on the subject of youth, music and education, what other values are present in youth banding? Banding is unique in that it is a self-supporting, self-firing phenomenon kept alive by the wish of the people who enjoy it. (How many professional orchestras would there be left in UK if they were unsubsidised? Any? None, I’m afraid. The figures don’t stack up.) The young player has to work to improve himself or herself with all the personal discipline and intelligence it takes. It is not too high-flown to call these intellectual skills of a high order. The individual then has to fit into the social group, the band, firstly at a lower level and then working upwards as they develop. These are the team skills, firstly learning to follow, then learning to lead. The lessons taken from banding about labour and love and life divine cannot now be found anywhere else in education. (How many top bands have taken players directly …. as one example among many …. from St Helen’s Youth? How many have offered a penny in return for all that development work?)
These are the social skills certainly not now available from sport. Banding teaches the social skills that sports and school education used to offer. Most modern team sport is nastiness, cheating and violence personified, while music education in schools … where a GCSE can be gained without being able to read musical notation … is, according to a former student of mine now teaching in the Manchester area, “more child minding than anything else”. Could anything be more important to the state of the nation today than the discipline that musical activity gives and banding in particular offers, free of charge? And I haven’t even mentioned the benefits that come from contact with good music, fine musicians and a widening of career horizons.
So where is English banding placed at the moment? Conducting the NYBB recently it was obvious that the young players are in very good shape. It is the older generations that are failing to provide a sound basis for the future musical fortunes of banding. Feckless or clueless? Your call.
A strong English banding organisation could deal with the contest barons and for a start require minimum standards of contest facilities. The Associations, whose Area contests provide some of the most disgraceful of facilities for bands that I have ever seen, are still in control of the Federation, so improvement is not going to come from there. (The contest officials often show wholly unsympathetic attitudes towards bands who have worked hard to raise the money to attend, travelling great distances, and who then compete for derisory prizes. All improvements in the conduct of contests in recent years in the UK have been initiated abroad.)
Another matter of concern is the question of monopoly. Monopolies are not pretty things, and in recent times banding has been rather badly served in this regard. Banding being a very small world, monopolies are taken rather for granted: we know the people who run them and sometimes they are our friends. Which is the very reason why there should be a strong impartial central body to make sure that banding is not used by some of these enterprising operators without a reasonable payback to banding.
The monopoly question brings up the question … what about young composers and arrangers? The future of banding really does depend more on these writers than on ‘me-and-you’ players and conductors. Using financial reserves gained from its religious activities, SP&S, the Salvation Army owned organisation, is rolling out its tanks more or less everywhere, in publishing, recording, and concert promotion. It would be extraordinary if this did not spill over into the choice of contest and concert material. In a letter to 4bars rest the MD of SP&S recently wrote the following: “I would see us evangelising not through 'preaching' in the magazine, but through the ever increasing performance of our sacred music, and through the personal contacts made within the banding fraternity.”
Whether for converts or cash, the bulky presence of SP&S/SA is nearing a monopoly status in several areas of banding. The development of young independent composers outside special interest groups is vital: if new writers are squeezed out of performance and contest opportunities by the subsidised productions of SP&S … or whoever … preaching a message, the range of music available will quickly become very narrow. (The SP&S catalogue has been compiled over many years for religious purposes, without any writers being paid by the SA. Leaving aside whether the music writers who have assigned their rights to the SA for religious reasons might approve of this commercial use of their time and talents, does this really constitute a fair market for normal people who have to live in the normal world? Young composers of talent who have a liking for bands will go elsewhere and not come back when faced with ‘competition’ so heavily weighted against them.)
So who do we think we, English banding, are? Are you just a member of the me-and-you club, or do you have any thought for banding itself, for its past and its future? Or are you a shrugger? Do you murmur “That’s banding!” smile, shrug, and pass by on the other side of the road?
As I reach the age where, any day, someone is likely to offer to help me cross the road, I have a final proposal to offer. (No, I do not want to go into adjudication now that I have reached the appropriate age!) In the case of nothing happening in the near future to improve English banding’s lot, can I suggest something similar to the initiative that Richard and I undertook years ago? It’s based on two thoughts. Firstly, most would agree that Yorkshire is still the centre of banding. And secondly, I think that top banding is very generous to its stars. Therefore can I suggest that the Musical Directors of the top-ranking six Bands of that County get together, with or without BBBF, and discuss the future of English banding to see whether they can help, or create an initiative? Or do Something? (With a bit of luck one of them might be English.)
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