CULTURES OF BRASS PROJECT

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Brass and woodwind players’ routes into the music profession

Brass and woodwind players’ routes into the music profession

Trevor Herbert and Helen Barlow

Brass and wind players are the product of musical, educational and even socio-cultural systems that make them distinctive; for example, it is sometimes possible to identify national performance styles because of the routes through which players passed as they moved towards the music profession. The forces of globalisation make such distinctions less obvious because the various devices through which musical performance is communicated have created a greater sense of uniformity. This is most clearly evidenced in sound recordings, which show a relentless movement in the second half of the twentieth century from noticeable difference in performance features to an obvious sameness.

Violinists and pianists tend to refer to didactic traditions (the way that successive generations of teachers influence each other and their pupils), but even though there are traces of this process in brass and wind playing, it is less strong. The way people are taught is important, but the traditions of teaching are less continuous. Three features seem to be important as far as brass and wind players are concerned:

• Their experience in the amateur world
• Their education at conservatoire level
• The consensus that is formed within professional music groupings

The comparison between violinists, pianists and brass and wind players is interesting because it points to some fundamental distinctions; for example, most brass and wind playing is public rather than privately oriented, and the amateur communal tradition is a very strong operator. Another interesting feature is the influence of the military: in many countries and especially in the UK until relatively recent times, military bands were the key moderator between amateurism and civilian professionalism.

The table is part of a much larger and more detailed data set that provides information on the musical origins of some of the UK’s professional brass and wind players. Taken with other information it reveals some of the trends that have occurred, particularly in the last hundred years.

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