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Re: Enjoying Contests (long but interesting!)

On Sun, 10 May 1998, David Read wrote:


On contesting...

> As a bird living in a tree (for example), to make the best music I want
> the best environment to enable me to do that. In the contest tree I will
> sing like all the other birds. 

Well, not exactly. The bird that finds a mate (and, hence, passes on its 
genes to the next generation and "survives" in evolutionary terms) will 
be the one that sings slightly louder, slightly sweeter or slightly more 
tunefully than all the other birds in the tree. True, they will all be 
singing the same song (they are, we assume, members of the same species), 
but some birds will sing it in a way which is more pleasing to members of 
the opposite sex. 

The birds are the individual bands on the contest 
platform, the birdsong is a test-piece, the potential mates are the 
adjudicators (!!!!) and, to a lesser extent, the audience. The winning 
band is the one that pleases 
the adjudicator(s) more than the others (although the criteria used to 
determine which band gives the best performance on the day vary from 
adjudicator to adjudicator, just as some women prefer tall men and some 
short). 

Of course, all this is more or less irrelevant to the survival 
of contests/the movement as a whole. No matter who "should" have won the 
Europeans or the Open this year, the bands will still enter the contests 
next year.


On the inclusion of french horns...

> The french horn might be the
> shuttle to bring us into the space age. If it is pants then fair enough.
> But should we not try it out?
>
> The fact is you can't try it out because banding is about contesting
> which doesn't allow french horns.
> 
> I'm not questioning whether banding is about to die. Of course not, but
> I am a little worried about the huge emphasis that is put on contesting
> and where it leaves us musically. I want to see more of festivals,
> commissions, interesting interpretations, music not rated on how
> challenging it is technically or even pats on the backs of bands from
> the federations for playing great music. Any other ideas or thoughts?

I agree to the extent that it would be almost impossible to introduce 
french horns into brass bands (apart from as a novelty, just as YBS 
performed celtic music or Faireys performed Acid House music). However, 
I don't think that this is solely due to contesting regulations. If 
bands wanted to play with french horns, then contests would eventually 
bend to allow them to play. I think the main reason that french horns 
could never be accomodated in a brass band is that, even if they did 
improve the performance of certain pieces, they could not make the band 
better overall (or, at the very least, they couldn't make the band 
significantly better). In the same way, the use of a solo trumpet or 
strange percussive effects (as in the New Buckenham Suite) may well 
improve the sound of one piece, but that doesn't mean that all cornet 
players should try to sound like sheep all the time.

Apart from this, I think the social roots of the brass band movement have 
precluded the possibility of including french horns. The only french 
horn players I know (and there seems to be a lot of them in Oxford) are 
privelaged types(!). Most brass bandsmen I know are not. (Of course, there 
must be exceptions. I have tried to think of one, but I can't. Generally 
speaking, the brass bands I have played with have been made up of 
ordinary blokes (like me - no comments from Alastair or Howard, please!);
a significant proportion of the french horn players I 
have met have been far from ordinary, if not because they are rich, then 
because they have a snobbish attitude when it comes to music). In summary, I
just can't see french horns 
fitting in to brass bands on a permanent basis.

That's all for now,

Cameron

P.S. I've just remembered one french horn player I know who started on 
cornet and is quite ordinary. But she is a pharmacologist, so she 
doesn't really count.

--
  Cameron Mabon (International Idiot)	   cmabon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Piano, cornet and duck-call
  Fundamental Brass	       http://users.ox.ac.uk/~newc0349/fun
  City of Oxford Band     http://www.jesus.ox.ac.uk/~cmabon/COSB.html


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