Last week, a brass band played outside the Corus steelworks on Teesside as it was closed down. With the strike of 1984-85, collectivism took on a political edge. Brass bands led marches to London. They led rallies in villages across the mining heartlands, North and South, and they played at the funerals of miners killed on picket lines. A sense of lost camaraderie remains. “Margaret Thatcher didn’t just decimate the pits, she decimated our community spirit,” says the former miner Ray Sykes, the 63-year-old chairman of Carlton Main. “With the closure of the collieries, she’s hurt my band.”
Today, bands are no longer the “glue” of their communities. The infrastructure they relied on — miners’ social clubs, bandstands and so on — has largely disappeared. And though they struggle on, the bands are disappearing, too. From about 20,000 brass bands at the turn of the 19th century, numbers are down to an estimated 1,000 bands. Anecdotally, bandsmen will tell you of ten bands a year folding. Banding’s grassroots are dying.
Why the crisis? The problem is money: both too much and too little. In recent years a footballing analogy has become more potent as sponsorship money has flooded the top echelons of brass banding, leaving the lower bands fighting for survival.
The top bands, such as Grimethorpe Colliery (famously the one playing in the 1996 movie Brassed Off), Black Dyke and Brighouse and Rastrick — all in Yorkshire — and the Wales-based Cory, can afford to pay their players five-figure retainers in addition to concert fees and travel expenses to contests and rehearsals.
Most players today own their instruments (though brass doesn’t come cheap; a tuba can cost £7,000). The catch is that the better you get, the more it costs. Carlton Main compete in the championship, pushing running costs to about £30,000 a year. Attending one contest can cost £3,000, for coach hire, the conductor’s fee and the sheet music (at least £100 a pop). Carlton Main’s players pay their own hotel costs and for travel to rehearsals. Self-sufficiency has replaced collectivism; how very Thatcherite.
词句笔记：
outlive:经受住，比……活得长，渡过
knock out：赶出去
echelon：等级，阶层
tuba：低音大喇叭
conductor：乐队指挥
