The Brass Band Story
Author: Trevor Herbert
Yale University Press 
Available from: https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300282573/the-brass-band-story/
Price: £25.00 

The public perception of the British brass band movement is in many ways a creation of idiosyncratic stereotypes: Hardy working-class sons of cloth and coal corralled to appreciate the finer aesthetics of musical culture by a form of Victorian mercantile-led moral rectitude.

Although a romantic notion threaded by the reality of circumstance, it is an opinion rarely challenged by its participants, who for far too long have found succour in the niche appreciation gained from rare moments of high profile media attention.  

Today, in a world of fast paced change, an affectionate reflection is retained of a relic from an age of declining communal and industrial relevance – its echoes resonating in reruns of ‘Brassed Off’ but rarely gaining a lasting presence even after performances at the BBC Proms. 

Wide audience

It is also why this outstanding publication, written to meet the author’s aim of producing a book deliberately intended to be accessible to a wide audience, makes for such enlightening reading.  

Trevor Herbert is Emeritus Professor of Music at the Open University and Research Professor at the Royal College of Music. 

It is also why this outstanding publication, written to meet the author’s aim of producing a book deliberately intended to be accessible to a wide audience, makes for such enlightening reading.  

The author of over 20 books that combine his professional career as a historian with his passionate personal interest (he is a former brass band and orchestral trombonist), he helped uncover the long-forgotten music of the pioneering Cyfarthfa Band close to his home in South Wales.  His editorship of ‘The British Brass Band – A Musical and Social History’  (2000) and ‘The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Brass Instruments’  (2019) created seminal works of research. 

Clear focus

Like the best modern social histories, ‘The Brass Band Story’  is written with a clear focus that brings its academic rigour to life - 284 pages of narrative (with another 80 pages of glossary and appendices) shorn of lingering misconceptions and idealistic fantasies. 

His forensic research is complemented by an engaging writing style backed by opinion of informed heft and authority.

His forensic research is complemented by an engaging writing style backed by opinion of informed heft and authority. He presents his arguments in 11 chapters of lucid persuasion, as well as an eye for detail and engaging detour; from the movement’s origins and precursors through to its modern-day challenges. 

Myths and anachronisms

The ‘myths and anachronisms’ that have long bedevilled its public persona are succinctly dealt with within the first two pages, whilst he closes with an equally pointed appreciation of future possibilities (made at the 2024 British Open) in the last two.  

the outstanding precised analysis on gender, education and idiom adjustments will undoubtably leave them immensely better informed on the why as well as the what that has happened over the past 60 years or so. 

In between the narrative leads through the obscure as well as entertaining by maintaining a pitch of engaging curiosity and explanation – from instrument developments and contesting, to ‘cornet mania’ and even the movement's conversion to low pitch.  

Outstanding

That may not leave the agnostic reader with a Damascene revelation to follow a lasting path to brass band contesting, but the outstanding precised analysis on gender, education and idiom adjustments will undoubtably leave them immensely better informed on the why as well as the what that has happened over the past 60 years or so. 

It ends with a chapter on the international scope of the modern movement and its impact, written with a distinct sense of the author’s optimism that any future history of the movement will not end in reported extinction - something he says has been regularly predicted since the late nineteenth century.

It also ensures that the general public is left in no doubt to what the true story of the past, present and future of the brass band is all about.

Iwan Fox