By Alan Clawley.
Like nearly everyone who was brought up in the Salvation Army I was taught to play a brass instrument and played in the band. Even someone who wasn’t up to it was usually given a drum to beat. So it was a nostalgic moment for me when Newport Town Band opened its programme in the Adrian Boult Hall on Saturday at the 2011 Birmingham Artsfest with a Salvation Army march entitled ‘Star Lake’ that I had played many times in my youth. The Newport band gave a creditable performance but I felt a little disappointed that a Birmingham band couldn’t have filled the bill. If I had been inspired to join, it would have been a long way to go for rehearsals.
Newport Town Band
I left the ‘Army’ many years ago but when my brother-in-law, who repairs brass instruments, gave me an old trombone, I thought I had better use it. So in 2004 I joined the South Birmingham Sinfonia. The repertoire of a symphony orchestra is vastly different from that of a Salvation Army band in the 1960s when all the music played had to be ‘soul-saving’ and published by the Salvation Army. William Booth famously asked ‘Why should the devil have all the best tunes?’ and then stole them from music hall or folk traditions. However the crossover between brass banding and orchestral playing is not easy – orchestral music for the trombone is written in bass, tenor or alto clefs and not the clef that veteran brass-banders like myself were used to. The notes also have to be transposed by a tone to sound in tune with the other instruments in the orchestra.
Brass bands are doing well today, helped by the 1996 film ‘Brassed Off’. Their roots are in the military bands of the nineteenth century but in the north of England they were often formed for the workers in big industries such as Grimethorpe Colliery, Fodens motor works and the Black Dyke Mills. The Salvation Army adopted the brass band to accompany congregational singing indoors and outside in all weathers. The music was made as easy as possible by being written in the treble clef (except for the bass trombone) and graded for players and bands of various abilities. All the players in brass bands sit on the same level and even the conductor doesn’t raise himself above the band by standing on a podium. Towns and villages all over the country have a brass band for entertainment and solemn events such as funerals and Remembrance Day services. Many schools have their own brass bands, often inspired by an enthusiastic teacher.
Of the 22 brass bands in the West Midlands it seems that only the City of Birmingham Brass Band and the Birmingham Citadel Salvation Army band are based in Birmingham today. Half are in the Black Country, seven in Coventry and 2 in Solihull. If works bands did exist in Birmingham they seem to have disappeared altogether. Were there brass bands at the Longbridge Works, Lucas’s and the HP Sauce factory at one time?
Salvation Army bands once marched the streets, a right that was established in law only after quite a few pitched battles, and one which has now been given up to the motor car, but marching was also a valuable training in ‘keeping to the beat’. I recently watched the members of the Birmingham Citadel band amble along the High Street to their open-air meeting outside Waterstones on a Sunday afternoon, where they opened their programme with a selection of music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s also some years since I last listened to an ensemble from a brass band play carols in the entrance of my local supermarket.
The traditional place for brass band performances is of course a Victorian band-stand in a public park on a Sunday afternoon. I have only seen this recently in Buxton Park in Derbyshire which has been much restored using a National Lottery grant, and in the private grounds of the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. I would love to hear a Birmingham brass band playing in the bandstands in Small Heath Park, Handsworth Park, Cannon Hill Park or Summerfield Park. I hope that’s not too sentimental an ambition for next year’s Artsfest.
