Welsh Journals

Late Victorian Welsh Bands: Taste, Virtuosity and Cymmrodorion Attitudes TREVOR HERBERT Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and un- accountable shape After brief preliminary shuffling and nudging, an elderly man emerged from the back of the group 'We are the silver band the Lord bless and keep you' [he] said in one breath, 'the band that no one could beat whatever but two indeed at the Eisteddfod that for all North Wales was look you.' This passage from Evelyn Waugh's marvellously vivid description of the first appearance of the brass band in his 1928 novel Decline and Fall provides one of its funniest moments. Of course, it outrages brass-band enthusiasts who see it adding substance to an already overworked cliché: a cliché advanced by middle-class, English, Edwardian intellectuals who often used brass bands as an easy target for jokes. Another middle-class, English, Edwardian intellectual, Mr Thomas Beecham, was equally disparaging. Addressing the Leeds luncheon club, also in 1928, he described brass bands as 'that superannuated, obsolete, beastly, disgusting, horrid method of music making'.2 His remarks were well reported and caused such offence that they merited comment in a number of leading national papers. But by 1928 brass bands were already classified as a subculture, remote from the mainstream of British art-music. Also, brass-band players were already realizing that their movement was beginning to decline from the mass popularity which had peaked in the 1890s. That Elgar was preparing to write a piece for brass band and Holst had already written one was of little account. Such forays by mainstream composers into amateur brass repertoire were properly