When I spotted new science minister Chris McDonald was a bandsman (he’s played with the Easington Colliery Band, which is a very well regarded northern Championship band, and the First Section Durham Miners’ Association Brass Band) it reminded me of what a strange world the British brass band – or “silver band” for southerners, the distinction is now largely meaningless – actually is.
Chris needs no excuse to talk about banding – happy to reel off a list of his favourite bands in parliamentary debate on the flimsiest of premises – and there is a delightful LBC interview where he is keen to wax lyrical on his interest and passion to the obvious pleasure of Nick Ferrari.
I often seem to meet people who are involved (or were involved) in the brass band world. Wonkhe isn’t really the place to talk about the music itself – which, depending on your disposition and heritage either makes hairs on the back of your neck stand up or is somewhat cloying, leaden and sentimental – but the best of the stories that I hear that go beyond the musician norms of on-stage mishaps, pranks, and volume drinking and into the unique world of brass band competitions.
I’m taking my boys out on the town
Let’s address the elephant in the room – you’ve all seen Brassed Off. If you haven’t, please stop reading this article and go and watch it. It is 107mins long. I’ll wait. It’s very loosely based on the Grimethorpe Colliery band winning the championship section of the National Brass Band Championships in 1992, just four days after Grimethorpe colliery itself was closed.
In other musical endeavours, winning a competition is a perhaps pleasant irrelevance. Outside of the professional world, people tend to play because they enjoy it or because they want to get better as a musician – the idea of spending time preparing for or participating in competitive music making just feels odd. In a serious “competing” brass band competitions are a huge deal. There are trophies and prize money, but the results are also used for promotion and relegation between sections (championship, and sections one through four – very much like a football league) all of which unlocks prestige and makes it easier to recruit better players.
To get to the Nationals, your band has to place well in an Area Championship (the eight banding areas of the UK: West, London and South, Midlands, Wales, North West, Yorkshire, North, Scotland) in its section. And to compete in an Area Championship a registered band needs to perform the required test piece for that section in that year. As every band has the same – nominal – 28-player line up, it is argued that it is easier to decide which is best; and the format reduces the variables further by marking based on the performance of a single piece in a single arrangement. So if you are attending the event, you would hear those pieces of music performed many times throughout the day. From the announcement of the test pieces to the day of the performance, bands would have rehearsed the test piece hundreds of times, all in order to get the best possible response from the adjudicators.
Who are the adjudicators? Usually very experienced players, or band leaders – so this is very much peer review. And even better, it is blind peer review – adjudicators are sealed into a box so they cannot know which band they are listening to. Adjudicators place bands in order within a section (the one they think is best is placed first, and so on). There is a rubric (the performance assessment criteria, produced by the Association of Brass Band Adjudicators) that outlines what is being asked for: everything from the fundamentals of musicianship and band cohesiveness through to the “wow” factor of exceptional quality or interpretation.
I thought that music mattered
So here we are taking a creative endeavour and making it behave like a competitive team sport. It is clearly going to have an effect on the music itself, and on the dynamics and culture of the bands involved. Brassed Off romanticises the idea of people from a small mining village working together and playing together: in reality there is a transfer market with the best players always seeking to move (often great distances) to better bands, or to better seats within bands (principal cornet is a much bigger deal than being on the back row, first chair is a better spot than second chair).
Given the pressure and high expectations around competition (both between and within bands) the culture can become toxic, and players may not feel supported or valued. Good bands take measures to address this, especially among junior players, but there is still work to be done.
And no band would survive if it did nothing other than compete: local concerts and tours further afield are how money is raised, and this requires a very different (and far wider) repertoire of pieces. Band leaders need to balance preparing test pieces with maintaining a book of tunes that can entertain the public. And entertaining the public isn’t just a financial necessity – it attracts the next generation of players and helps sustain the sadly dwindling number of bands in the UK.
A competitive environment with only a small number of results that truly matter is fertile ground for a parallel league table industry. Other competitions (outside of the areas and the nationals) are useful practice – and prize money – for bands, but the results here can be and are statistically massaged into various rankings that people obsess over. There’s even a thriving mythology: does the order in which bands play affect ranking decisions? It has been very confidently argued that it does.
All in the name of progress. And for a few lousy bob.
Competition, fundamentally, is a way of sharing out a limited resource, with more going to the most deserving or the most proficient. Money is what it often comes down to, but esteem and profile are also very desirable. REF, in universities, is used to allocate some funding, but it is equally seen as a means of departments and researchers demonstrating their prowess to people they want to work with. Likewise, brass band competition winners can access bigger concerts, recording contracts, and attract better players as a result of their success.
If we must have competition, it needs to be universally perceived as fair: and the judgement (and esteem) of peers is generally seen as fairer than more abstract targets, even though we have to deal occasionally with accusations of bias or underhand behavior. There are measures – anonymisation and blind assessment – that can be taken to deal with these. And it needs to be a fair assessment of the actual department (or band) itself – well-published temporary REF hires or stellar international dep players distort the analysis of day-to-day excellence.
It is reasonable, if we care about an activity and if we value it, to design competitions in such a way that they enhance both the quality of the activity as practiced and the experience of the people involved. Here, academia is a little further ahead of the brass band world in explicitly looking for a healthy and supportive culture in assessing the quality of the research. Likewise, far from asking every department to carry out one identical piece of research as best they possibly can, it has widened what kinds of evidence are acceptable in order to drive innovation and accessibility. Other brass band competitions do have “own choice” repertoire, but not the areas or nationals.
The downside of peer review is that competition becomes an industry or community talking to itself. As a non-expert I’ve no way of knowing whether the current champion band of the UK (Desford Colliery) is the best band for people to listen to, or the merely best band at playing Gregson’s “Symphony in Two Movements” – I mean, I’m betting they are probably pretty good. Again, REF has the upper hand here, in that the assessment builds in a reckoning of the impact creative work has outside of academia.
It’s by no means a perfect comparison. I mean, on the one hand you have a niche activity accreting an enormously complex assessment process that can obsess people to an unhealthy extent and can even act as a detriment to creativity and innovation, and on the other hand you have the world of the British brass band. But where competition is needed in a world that would ideally support everyone in becoming the best they possibly can, we need to get our head out of the data and think about the wider implications of the incentives we are building.
