Though its origins lie in the Middle Ages and the practices of household bards and musicians of the nobility, the modern eisteddfod tradition developed from the late eighteenth century as an essentially literary movement and part of the romantic movement that has been termed the Celtic revival. Music developed as part of the eisteddfod at local and national levels, becoming a major and eventually primary presence. The emphasis was on vocal music both solo and choral, and alongside its role in detecting and curating Welsh traditional music the eisteddfod introduced the classical concert to Welsh audiences. Eisteddfodau were always competitive events and from the later nineteenth century, choral contests helped to engender popular interest in choral singing as a practice representative of Welshness. The chapter describes the development of eisteddfodau and explains their importance in various stages of Welsh history. It also examines what were often perceived as the negative effects of eisteddfod competition and the conflict it created between meeting popular demand and the achievement of higher musical standards among the population.

This book is the first to deal with an aspect of twentieth-century music that is not covered in detail elsewhere: it traces the origins, stimuli and legacies of the modern brass ensemble, celebrates the vitality and diversity of its music-making and brings together information on its performance practice, repertory, reception and cultures. The study ultimately focuses on developments in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, but refers extensively to other periods and loci where events caused interactions, influence and change.

What is currently perceived as a modern ‘brass ensemble’ in Britain and beyond barely existed in the first half of the twentieth century; antecedents in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century and St Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century were largely unknown in Britain at that time. Following World War II, the brass quintet and other orchestral groupings emerged in the United States and in Europe; the practices and repertoires associated with these modern groups came from professional players playing orchestral instruments.

By far the most acclaimed British brass ensemble of the late twentieth century was the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. From its foundation in 1951 it rose from simple beginnings to establish an international reputation by the time it disbanded in 1986. Many consider that this ensemble initiated a wide cultural and social understanding of brass chamber music, eventually earning as similar critical attention as leading string quartets and other branches of art music. Other ensembles in Britain and overseas emulated its musical models, and a nucleus of performers, composers and like-minded parties increased ensembles’ recognition and momentum from the 1960s. The brass quintet, ten-piece ensemble and trombone quartet remain popular formations, and repertoire exists for larger directed ensembles with percussion.

Music-making by small groups of brass instruments in various guises has a long history, and two strands of development can be traced. One stretches back into the art music tradition, including European instrumental music of the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical periods. Transcription for modern brass instruments and ensuing historically informed performance are studied in detail. A second strand of activity materialised in the nineteenth century with the advent of families of chromatic brass; the emergence of both professional and amateur idioms at that time includes the amateur British brass band.

In the early 1960s, the global record industry experienced a boom that was caused by the rapid growth of popular music. In Britain and the United States, the gramophone companies essentially generated a new commercial market that was supplementary to live music-making, and the record outstripped the radio broadcast. The ‘album’ (LP, long playing record) became the dominant means of expression of popular music, exemplified by the early records of The Beatles and those of Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones. Imaginative record covers, such as the notable Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), designed by Peter Blake, made albums highly desirable possessions. An additional benefit of the record industry’s commercial buoyancy was an increased commitment to classical music and the viability of ambitious musical projects: Decca’s 1966 issue of a first complete Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted by George Solti, preceded many ventures into ‘early music’ (initially, music predating J. S. Bach), contemporary music and chamber music.

In the United States, a record of brass music from this period, The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli (LP, 1969), recorded in one day by the brass of the Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago orchestras, was a phenomenon; it received a 1970 Grammy award for chamber performance, chosen from a number of outstanding nominees. In Britain, the judgement of this record was on occasion reserved: from Gramophone magazine for example: ‘more than ever convinced that the music was conceived in different emotional terms’. Nevertheless, this remarkable record, delivered by orchestral players who would intuitively feel at one in a performance of Copland’s Third Symphony, marked a watershed moment for brass music on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, British brass chamber music developed rapidly. But its performance practice differed subtly from prevailing styles of orchestral playing and was increasingly influenced by separate branches of music-making. The Philip Jones Brass Ensemble (PJBE) was the most prominent British group at this time, and its national profile was brought about substantially through regular collaborations with established choirs and their conductors: it was the ensemble of choice for David Willcocks and the Bach Choir; of John Eliot Gardiner in 1970 for his own edition of Monteverdi’s Vespers which marked the quatercentenary of the composer’s birth in 1567; and the choice of Roger Norrington for his concerts of ‘Schütz in the Round’.

After World War II, the British Government made great efforts to stimulate renewed confidence and endeavour in culture. In 1946, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts was consolidated into the Arts Council of Great Britain; in addition, the BBC launched a Third Programme (radio), of great stimulus to music and drama. In 1947, the Edinburgh International Festival was launched by Rudolf Bing, an Austrian impresario who had fled the Nazis, and from its inception the festival was the most illustrious of many throughout the country. In the community, music-making was encouraged to be less esoteric, less middle-class in its demography. Amateur and school music-making proliferated, and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain was founded in 1948. In 1951 the Festival of Britain, that included the opening of the Royal Festival Hall, London, was aimed to offset post-war austerity and mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition.

What we perceive as modern brass ensembles were virtually non-existent in Britain at this time, but through the 1950s and 1960s the repertoire, sound world and aspirations of many professional brass players changed significantly. In postwar Britain, many players imported orchestral brass instruments from Germany, the United States and France; a standardisation of brass instruments’ pitch in 1964 helped align amateur and professional cultures and a rapid and vital expansion occurred in Britain’s recording industry. In this reforming environment, respective professional brass players formed chamber music groups that became competitive and influential.

A public concert given by the brass of the London Baroque Orchestra in 1948, including trumpeter Malcolm Arnold (1921–2006) and hornist Dennis Brain (1921–57), was exceptional in respect of its repertoire. The programme contained music by Cherubini and Rossini, as well as more recent works by Hindemith and his ex-pupil Arnold Cooke. It also listed a transcription of Orlando Lassus’s music by Malcolm Arnold, whose later Brass Quintet would have a significant impact in the 1960s. In post-war Britain, such events were rare; the most familiar brass music in Britain was that of the amateur brass band, which adopted a radically different repertoire and performance practice.

Near the start of August of 1815, a box was delivered to the offices of the Royal Dutch Institute of the Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam containing the prototype of a novel musical timekeeper and a letter describing the apparatus. It had been posted by a thirty-eight-year-old named Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel (1777–1826), a clockmaker from the small, rural German town of Lippstadt, Westphalia, north of the Ruhr Valley, who had since emigrated to the Dutch capital. Winkel had been born to a clockmaker, though by the time he was five both his mother and father were dead. Little else is known about Winkel’s early life, beyond his being an orphan and a Lutheran, and his becoming a free citizen in 1799, following the completion of a clock making apprenticeship. Only in 1816 do his whereabouts again resurface, the year he moved from a house located north of central Amsterdam to a purchased house in the Reguliersgracht on the opposite side of the city center.

How long Winkel had already been living in the capital by this point is no better understood than his specific reason for coming here. Whether he was aware that Amsterdam had been attracting a steady flow of newcomers for a century, a consequence of its openness to immigrant populations, Winkel was certainly operating under the assumption that such an environment offered a budding clockmaker far more opportunity than provincial Lippstadt. Curiously, the prototype itself provides one critical piece of information regarding Winkel’s whereabouts, for here the inventor had affixed an inscription reading “Discovered by D. N. Winkel on 27 November 1814 in Amsterdam.” This suggests that he had been living in the city for some time prior to purchasing his house in the Reguliersgracht and gives us pause to wonder if his pendulum might have been the inspiration behind his move to the city in the first place?

The instrument Winkel presented to the Royal Dutch Institute was, in essence, an inverted or double-weighted pendulum, a radical approach destined with time to revolutionize musical timekeeping, although who or what initially inspired his design has been lost to us.

In 1785 the following advertisement appeared in a London daily:

The apparatus advertised was being offered by William Pridgin (dates unknown), a clockmaker from York who had apprenticed for seven years with another maker by the name of William Thornton, himself a student of noted clockmaker Henry Hindley. Pridgin, who worked out of a shop located in York’s Coney Street, remained professionally active there until around 1793, prior to relocating to Hull. According to Pridgin’s advertisement, his “time beaters” were both reliable and accurate, having passed muster with musicians and inspectors alike. The maker also put a premium on both convenience and cost; unlike Breguet, Pridgin was more than willing to finish the instrument according to the taste of the buyer and adjust cost accordingly.

As with most relationships, that which developed between composers and the metronome over the course of the nineteenth century was sometimes productive and at other times yielded less positive results. Nevertheless, every composer post-Beethoven had to come to terms with the device in one way or another, even if that meant choosing to forsake it. Beethoven, of course, was “free” of Maelzel’s metronome for the majority of his life, and if we imagine his career truly getting underway following his arrival in Vienna in 1792, some twenty-five years were still to elapse before he obtained his first metronome. Whether we regard his developing connection to the instrument at this point as obsessive or simply a preoccupation, Beethoven’s plan to metronomize all his work, both past and present, reflects a level of intensity in excess of that experienced by most composers. To put matters into perspective, we might begin by considering two other German composers, each born about a decade and a half after Beethoven: Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), who died a year before Beethoven, and Louis Spohr (1784–1859), who outlived both by some twenty years.

Weber rocketed to international fame in 1821, with the luminous success of what is arguably the first important German romantic opera, Der Freischütz, a score that drew inspiration from nature and German folksong. Two years later, when Weber came to Vienna to conduct the premiere of his latest opera, Euryanthe, he called on Beethoven. Beethoven had previously voiced his astonishment over the striking originality of Der Freischütz and now Weber wrote that he was received “with an affection that was touching; he embraced me most heartily at least six or seven times … this rough, repellent man actually paid court to me, served me at table as if I had been his lady.” It is a striking image, Beethoven waiting on another and doing so with humility, and we are left to wonder if during the course of their time together their conversation might have turned to their respective impressions of Maelzel’s invention?

The series of stunning marble reliefs with which the artisan Luca della Robbia (c. 1400–1482) decorated his fifteenth-century organ loft were never meant to serve as historical artifacts. To their Florentine creator, they were simply spirited youths engaged in musical activities intended to adorn the front of his cantoria—the name by which the organ loft would subsequently become known on account of its eventual use as a singing gallery. The project, Luca’s first known commission, was begun in 1431 and would take the better part of the next seven years to complete. When finished, the cantoria would be installed within the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, the Florentine Duomo.

Whatever thoughts Luca may have harbored about his marble youths or his personal contribution to the Duomo have long been lost to us. Without doubt the sculptor recognized the value of his labor, yet as a hired artisan he might just as easily have considered the fulfillment of the commission but a stepping-stone to the next project. Furthermore, for all his talent and stunning command of his medium, Luca would also have been only too aware that his loft would literally be overshadowed by what was to soar above it, the incomparable dome of Brunelleschi then nearing completion. Today, however, we can appreciate Luca’s gracefully hewn panels not simply for their artistic significance but for what they tell us about musical communication. They are, in essence, time capsules detailing the subtle—and sometimes not-so-subtle—act of rhythmic timekeeping from a distant past.

A member of Florence’s artistic elite whose circle included Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello and Lorenzo Ghiberti, Luca had more than earned the Duomo commission. In fact, the artist had already proven himself in a completely different medium when, still in his twenties, he collaborated with Ghiberti on the latter’s famous bronze Baptistry doors. Luca then moved on to marble. It was his scenes carved for Giotto’s campanile, the bell tower adjacent to the Duomo, that likely brought the sculptor to the attention of Vieri de’ Medici, a distant relative of the powerful banking dynasty who subsequently commissioned the organ loft.

That Sauveur and Loulié had been on a collision course for some time must have been evident to both men, for in 1696, around the time their research commenced, Loulié’s Élements ou Principes de Musique, the musical primer dedicated to his former student, the Duke of Chartres, appeared in print. Sauveur would familiarize himself with this work, particularly its closing pages, which featured a description and a diagram of what Loulié deemed his chronomètre, his musical timekeeper. Whether or not Loulié consulted with Sauveur about the instrument’s design, we might easily imagine Loulié’s device sparking in Sauveur no small pang of envy or jealousy. The musician, not the scientist, had been the first to propose a means of accurately measuring musical time. For his part, Sauveur would come to regard Loulié’s concept as faulty and short-sighted and was inspired to realize what he believed was a more practical solution.

Part I of Loulié’s Élements was a simple singing manual for children, covering basic musical knowledge—the seven notes of music, the C clef, accidentals, note names and so on, “elements” Loulié would have frequently taught others during his experiences as a tutor. Part II was intended for more advanced students, covering the concepts of scales, clefs and meter, all of which Loulié proudly proclaimed were “presented in a very methodical and novel manner.” Students and teachers alike no doubt found the first two portions of Élements of great value but it is in Part III, by far the most advanced, that Loulié’s most memorable contributions lie. At the start of this final section Loulié outlined his concept for a monochord, a device about the size of a spinet, with immovable bridges at either end, across which one or more strings could be strung and stretched to the desired tightness with pegs. Another bridge, this one moveable and placed toward the center, would stop the string at a desired length or division, allowing for the study of pitch and vibration.

Of course, the study of a vibrating string was hardly a novel undertaking.

To those living during the Renaissance, an age marked by exploration and self-reliance, the connection between the human and musical pulse must have seemed only natural. Bridging the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, the era’s rebirth or reawakening of human knowledge percolated in fourteenth-century Italy before spilling out across all of Europe in the centuries that followed. Aristotelian arguments, once accepted as authoritative and propagated by medieval scholars, were exposed one by one, throwing wide the door to a reexamination of the world’s workings. Everything, in short, was open for intellectual reevaluation and reconsideration, from ancient Greek and Latin texts, any number of which were then being rediscovered, to the nature of religion, the acceleration of falling bodies, the circulation system or the physics of a vibrating string. Gazing skyward, polymaths probed the heavens and comprehended that while man may have been the measure of all things, Earth was but a cog in the cosmic wheel. This explosion of intellectual and humanistic thought was visible and audible in all aspects of life, from the design of cities and the shapes of its buildings to the paintings, sculptures and music filling the cathedrals and palatial courts.

Of the seemingly infinite variety of ideas born of the fifteenth century, perhaps none exerted stronger influence in a greater variety of disciplines than the printing press. Texts, previously available only in expensive and time-consuming, hand-copied versions could now reach unprecedented numbers of readers. The printing press may have been the brainchild of Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg, but the device was beautifully suited to the flurry of activity thriving in Italy, where an international legion of engineers, philosophers and musicians found themselves in the employ of wealthy courts, including those of the Medici, Este and Gonzaga families, or religious institutions, whether the Vatican or a rural monastery. By the end of the fifteenth century, some two hundred printing presses were operating in Venice alone. Some of the most important work was being done by Aldo Manuzio, whose Aldine Press released more than 150 titles, including ancient Greek and Latin texts of Aristotle, Aristophanes, Homer and Euripides, and his fellow Italians Dante and Petrarch.