The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments (Cambridge Companions to Music) by Trevor Herbert & John Wallace

Author:Trevor Herbert & John Wallace [Herbert, Trevor & Wallace, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780521563437
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1997-10-13T02:00:00+00:00

13 Brass bands and other vernacular brass traditions1

Trevor Herbert

Virtually every major involvement of the lower social orders with brass instruments in western cultures dates from the nineteenth century. There are exceptions of course; Moravian trombonists were not professional players,2 and there are instances of horn and trumpet calls being sounded by enlisted military musicians. However, the engagement of masses of ordinary working people with brass instruments, both as players and listeners, starts between 1830 and 1850.

The idea that the brass players who populated Europe from the Middle Ages – alta band players, waits, Stadtpfeifer, court or church musicians, state trumpeters or whatever else they were called – were connected to, or had a causal relationship with, the amateurs who bought valve instruments in the nineteenth century is spurious. To deny the compelling reality that widespread amateur brass playing was new in the nineteenth century, a feature of modernity, is to misunderstand one of the most remarkable sociological shifts to have occurred in the history of music.3 Almost anyone who, in say 1820, possessed a sophisticated skill on an art-music instrument and did not make a living at it was, virtually by definition, an aristocrat or a member of the wealthy bourgeoisie.4 Yet, within a single generation, such skills were commonplace among amateur brass band players across Europe and America. It was a moment of vast importance; it led to changes in the idiom of many brass instruments, and it was one of the ways in which sophisticated music making can genuinely be said to have contributed to social emancipation. In England in the eighteenth century, few people knew what a trombone was, and trumpet and horn players of high quality were in short supply; in the mid nineteenth century, cotton-mill workers could be found whose mastery of the intricate skills of brass instruments matched that of some members of the world’s greatest orchestras. Musical heroes emerged whose names became household words. Brass instruments were the first medium in modern times through which vernacular traditions fused with the deep history and values of western music so as to change those values.

The most important reasons why brass instruments became popular among amateurs are that the application of valves made them easier to play, and that a coincidence of other circumstances made it possible for poorer people to own them. Almost all brass players before the 1830s were professionals. The skills of trombonists, horn players and trumpeters were rare, and their instruments were expensive. Valve instruments changed all that. The production of the lower notes of basic harmonic series has always been easy on a brass instrument; the great innovatory facility of valves was that the manipulation of them – and, consequently, the chromatic notes to which they give access – required the use of just the three most dextrous fingers of the right hand. The new instruments could be learned easily by rote. Indeed there is abundant evidence that many of the so-called ‘professors’ who taught amateurs how to play brass instruments

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