Herbert, T. (2025) Bands as musical subcultures: cultures, practices, and influences. In: Practice in Context: Historically Informed Practices in Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 84-100. ISBN 9780197571354 (hardback) 9780197571385 (e-book) (In Press)
Abstract
This chapter examines the place of military, brass, and show bands in nineteenth-century music culture and their relationship to the classical music mainstream. It concludes that each of these domains was related to, but separate from, art music culture, its institutions, repertoires, and practices. It argues that bands were subcultures the identities of which were internally formed and shared through structural networks. Obvious structural similarities defined each type of band—their instrumentations, the way performers were recruited, and their purposes in the musical life of the period, for example. These distinctions created value systems that served to define their performance idioms. There was mobility from these subcultures to the classical music mainstream. For example, almost all brass and wind players were trained and gained their formidable musical experience in military bands. In the first part of the period this included players who had never enrolled in the military but were hired as freelancers by regiments as needs arose. It followed that the performance practices of bands, including brass bands that in many respects were replications of military models, caused performance conventions to be transferred to aspects of art music. The chapter also touches on the organological issues that were shared between bands and orchestras, in a period when almost all wind instruments were the subject of major design developments that led to both gradual and acute reforms to their music idioms.
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