This isn’t really news about the band – more a set of
variations on a theme. The musings were
prompted by reading the post on Facebook about our MD and his choir visiting
the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in Glasgow
(where, of course, one of the band’s patrons, John Wallace, is the principal)
while on tour in Scotland . This started a train of thought about
students, teachers, music, musicians and all the links between them. Plus, of course, audiences, who form a very
important part of the mix.
Occasionally members of the band can be heard muttering
things like ‘Oh, not again’ when a piece of music that’s been played a million
times comes up. Come on, we’ve all said
it! But probably not all about the same
piece, and there’s a clue. Because who’s
to say that someone in the audience isn’t hearing that piece of music for the
first time? And maybe, just maybe, it
could change their life – either by inspiring them to find out more about
music, or even by motivating them to begin making music themselves. As someone once said, every performance is a
premiere.
You just can never tell when that spark, that moment of
magic, will catch and hold. Maybe it
could be hearing a particular piece of music, maybe it could be the performance
of a particular musician, maybe the inspiration of a dedicated teacher. In the band right now we’ve got a wind player
who began on the clarinet after hearing Emma Johnson play and a brass player
whose entire career path changed as a result of discovering music.
And it works the other way, too. During the band’s comparatively short
existence, seven members have gone on to third-level music studies at both
university and conservatory. The
longer-serving brass members will have happy memories of the times when John
Wallace, in the days when he was still playing trumpet professionally, visited
us for workshops and performances. Who
knows whether one day, some of our current members may find themselves as
John’s students, now that he’s heading up the Royal Scottish Conservatoire?
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