On the magical, warm British sound
How British military bands owe a debt to the North
One of my highlights of 2021 was Prince Philips’s funeral at Windsor Castle on 17th April, a glorious spring afternoon.
While the funeral service featured some great music performed by a group of four singers, for me the highlight was the massed military bands performing tunes including Nimrod and Jerusalem in the quadrangle.
Composed of Scots Guards, Royal Marines and the Royal Air Force, the bands and soldiers looked pretty spectacular in their different coloured uniforms. But it was the playing that really grabbed me. In this country I think we take the quality of this playing largely for granted. We rarely hear how it comes about. However the lovely soft, smooth, warm sound of the British military band is pretty much unique across the world.
So what is it all about? Where does this magical sound come from?
As more of an enthusiast than expert, I’m not going to try to answer that question definitively. However I do want to point in what I think is a rather interesting direction.
The four-minute video below shows the newly-formed British Army Band Catterick at the inauguration ceremony for a new joint German-British engineering battalion based in Germany. They are playing the Florentiner March by the Czech composer Julius Fučík, a piece which is more associated with their hosts.
Some of the German comments to the video pick up on the differences in the way the British play the piece, with one referring to how, “it's really interesting that English marching bands have their own smooth sound. This is particularly noticeable in marches that are very well known to us, such as the Florentine.” Someone replied, “Exactly. The light vibrato in the tenor voices (tenor horns, baritones), which is not played that way in Germany, but is typical of British brass music, also belongs to this soft sound.”
The key word here is ‘vibrato’: a term which describes variation of pitch in the playing of a musical instrument. When playing with vibrato, you are not playing a note so much as a variation of sound based around that note. At least for wind instruments, this only works if the note is extended, as you can see in this demonstration by the American jazz trombonist Dion Tucker.
Perhaps the best visible demonstration of brass vibrato I have seen is from a Royal Marines trumpet player in the video below. You can clearly see his lips/jaw moving to create the right vibrating effect in this rather fine performance of El Triello by Ennio Morricone.
With vibrato a player can slip from one note into another without a pause in sound. The separate notes effectively merge into one another, creating a wave of continuous sound rather than a succession of different, separated sounds.
Check out the Florentiner March played by the Bundeswehr band Heeresmusikkorps Hannover (which is present at the same event as the Catterick band) and you will hear the difference in the playing. While the Catterick sound using vibrato is smooth and warm, Hannover’s is staccato but more precise and forceful without it. This difference is particularly noticeable in the slow second movement of the piece.
The band that Catterick sent to play at the event is a brass band (as you can see more clearly in this longer clip). Catterick is in North Yorkshire, close to the various former mining areas where brass bands proliferated and continue to be an important source of community and local pride. As you can hear here, many of the players from Army Band Catterick learned their craft in brass bands.
However brass bands are a common source of recruitment for all British military bands. A Royal Marines Band Service video showing off its recruitment process stars an 18-year girl from the Stannington Brass Band in Sheffield playing a tenor horn. Check out the Stannington Band itself and you will notice a less polished but similarly warm sound to Catterick and the massed bands at Prince Philip’s funeral. It is laden with vibrato, which helps bring out the emotion in a slow, sad song – not something you would normally associate with Yorkshiremen or indeed with the British armed forces.
Vibrato has its pros and cons. British brass bands have long been renowned - or notorious – for it. It seems to involve a trade-off. On one hand it can make possible more characterful playing. On the other hand the fact that you are not blowing hard and straight into the instrument means you lose force and therefore volume in the playing of a note. It can also mean a loss of precision, since you aren’t just playing that single note but rather playing around it. Then, for wind instrument players, there is the matter of where to take your breaths. Lastly I’m guessing that habit can lead to over-use and losing the ability to do the basics and play your notes straight and well.
The Florentiner March also features in the film Brassed Off, in which the conductor played by Pete Postlethwaite zaps the thing along at such a rate that vibrato is pretty much impossible. And this is I think one of the most important things about this technique (or range of techniques) – that it comes into its own in tunes that are slow or played slow, or in slower parts.
This brings us back to Prince Philip’s funeral, in which the pieces played by the massed bands were all relatively slow. As a result, the warm, smooth, soft sound could come to the fore, showing off this most distinctive and attractive aspect of British military band playing. Indeed I think it is a general trait of British military bands as well as brass bands: that for them, the sad songs are the best ones.
Addition: I would be interested to hear more about how this came about historically: whether the style developed within brass bands or if it came from somewhere else.
I plan to write another piece in due course on British military bands, also with a German link. However the next piece I have planned is ‘Scruton for lefties’, a piece for paying subscribers only, considering how the late conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton might appeal to some left-wingers.