Brass BAnd: Hymn to the Highlands

[Alan H]

Maybe some of you know that there's a tradition of Brass Bands in the UK. These bands had equivalents in the USA through the late 1800's and then the genre sort of died out, here. The Balkan countries have a similar tradition and so does Germany.

For those who are interested, there's a lovely, somewhat cute, but with a real edge to it...."Brass Band Movie" called "Brassed Off" which you can view on YouTube as it was never, to put it mildly... a blockbuster hit. Well, you can view a large quanitity of the musical numbers anyway.

I'd been interested in Brass Bands, the UK version for several years, so you can imagine how excited I was to come across one in Callender, last summer on our trip to Scotland. I got to sit in with the band, playing alto horn for half their concert in the park and I loved..loved it. Now I want to own an alto horn!

Well, it so happens that a fellow by the name of Philip Sparke has written an extended Suite for Brass Band called "Hymn to the Highlands". I happen to really love the piece "Flowerdale", a solo for soprano cornet.

Here are some YouTube links to the individual pieces. This would be very difficult for a High School brass section to play, not because the music is terribly hard, but because the instruments are hard to find in the USA. The Alto Horn parts could be played on French Horn, which would help.

Flowerdale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpWPck3gZxU

Ardross Castle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS3tLYURi_I

Strathcarron

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFQ3g_DMPC4

Dundonnell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56UuL6dvsaw

[Lake Mist]

Flowerdale was my favorite, followed by Dundonnell.

[OC Richard]

Now you're talking! I love that sort of music.

Many may not know that we have an excellent British Brass Band right here in California

http://www.goldenstatebritishbrassband.org/

I've seen them perform many times, they're great.

Brassed Off is one of my all-time favourite films! The music is fantastic. Some may not realize that the music you hear on the soundtrack is played the by actual Colliery Band that the actors portray. So you're hearing coal miners, not professional studio musicians, and they are amazing.

The band is the Grimethorpe Colliery Band

http://www.grimethorpeband.com/

What distinguishes the British bands from American ones is that the British bands are all-conical save for the trombones. They have cornets, which play the same notes as a trumpet but have a conical bore and therefore a darker tone, and various mid-sized instruments to fill in the spectrum between the cornets and the tubas. (The tuba, by the way, is a bass cornet, not a bass trumpet.)

I come from coal country, in the mountains of West Virginia, and my grandfather was a coal miner and played euphonium in a local miner's band. We had that tradition here too!

[Pleater]

That is my neck of the woods - the Grimethorpe band was successor to the Cudworth colliery band, and my sister now lives in Cudworth. We grew up not far away, in Kendray.

I love the sound of brass bands, and also the small groups which play for the morris dancing from that area. At school we had to make do with a gramophone and a small selection of old 78s, so it is always good to recruit, or in some cases pressgang a stray player to do the honours.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

[Alan H]

OCRichard....exactly. The unique sound is from the collection of brass instruments. A cornet doesn't really sound like a trumpet. An Alto Horn doesn't sound like a French Horn, though understand that many UK french horn players double on alto horn. Put it all together and what you get has a much more mellow, blended sound than a typical brass ensemble here in the USA which is using trumpets, french horns, euphoniums (also in the UK ensemble) and tubas.

Another reason that the UK Brass Band has such a different sound from US brass groups is that the UK version uses flugelhorns on their own parts. In the USA the flugelhorn has become a jazz instrument. Think Chuck Mangione, Clark Terry and Bobby Shew. Nobody that I know of plays "classical" flugelhorn over here.

You can find USA-style alto horns on ebay pretty often. The most common version is a horn in F or e-flat with forward facing valves and a bent-over bell. This is entirely a different layout from the UK or French or German horns of the same range. The were popularly called "peckhorns" because they'd "peck" at the offbeats, providing rhythm to a tune. Basically, they'd play the "pah' on the OomPah.

Flugelhorn. I love flugelhorn. if I succumb to the need to have an alternative brass instrument, it will probably be flugelhorn rather than alto horn.

I notice that the lovely lass who plays flugelhorn in the Callendar band recently won a 2nd place in an all-UK competition for flugelhorn soloists.

[Alan H]

I recently came across some photographs of the Brass Band in Jamestown, here in northern California.

There were two pictures of the band around 1880 and they were fascinating. Thing is, the majority of the early miners in the hard-rock mines here in California were Cornish men, who probably brought the brass band tradition with them. Cornets, euphoniums, alto horns, one metal clarinet!!!..... and an over-the shoulder sort of "sousaphone" called a "Helicon Tuba" with a very conical bore and almost no flare at all were in the photograph. I wish I could get a copy of it.

The Eureka Brass Band.

[OC Richard]

Here's a 19th century Cornish silver band from Colorado

http://www.darylburkhard.com/cornishminers.html

My ancestry is partly Cornish. When cheaper Malaysian tin flooded the market in the 1870s many of the ancient Cornish mines (which had been in business since Roman times, if not earlier) went belly-up and the miners had to find work elsewhere.

My Cornish ancestors first moved to Kintyre Scotland, and then to Dalton-in-Furness England. Presumably they mined coal at these places. Then they moved, around 1900, to central West Virginia, where I'm from.

I have a wonderful photo c1910 of my grandfather in his band uniform posing with his euphonium. His uniform cap says LMB and I've not found anyone back home who knows what that might be, other than MB being "miners' band".

[The Q]

Kintyre was a coal mining area,
Dalton in Furness was an Iron mining area,
I love brass bands myself but have no musical abilities whatsoever.
Bands were an integral part of any community prior to the arrival of the gramophone and later radio. Even the little railway (all 62 miles of it) in which my family were involved, had a works band . The members of that would have joined Swindon Great Western Railway Brass band in 1923 when The MSWJR was taken over. Currently the GWR band goes under the name Swindon Pegasus Brass band.
Sadly many brass bands struggle to get members as many schools have dropped brass instrument training or come to that any instrument training. Anyway the majority of children who want to learn an instrument want to learn keyboards or Guitar.

[Alan H]

OCR, that was a good article...thanks!

And as an added plus, there's a Helicon Tuba in the picture!!

[Stitchwiz]

Thank you for all the links, gentlemen. What a treat!

I'm old school enough that I don't think to listen on line. I go to Dad's collection of thousands upon thousands of recordings that he has put into his iMac and just play them. He has enough band music that he could play 24/7 for month and still not hear it all. And then there is all the other music! Awesome!

I grew up listening to Grimethorpe Colliery Band amongst many, many others - from pipes, to brass, to jazz, to regimental, to full orchestras. It is wonderful to hear new arrangements. Music has been part of the warp and weft of my life - I can't live without music! I think I've been exposed to almost everything and am learning all the time.

My uncle and one of my sons both play various horns. It is very interesting to watch them switch between them. Then they switch out the mouthpieces and get an totally different sound! Amazing!