The Cyfarthfa Band in its period of grace

Herbert, T. (2024) The Cyfarthfa Band in its period of grace. In: Cyfarthfa Castle 1825-2025: A People's History. Merthyr and District Historical Society, Merthyr Tydfil. (In Press)

Abstract

The Cyfarthfa Band flourished between the mid 1840s and the late 1870s. It was founded earlier and lasted longer, but it was in this period that it was one of the greatest bands the world had known. Such a bold claim is credible because we know so much about it. No other band has left a trail of sources that reveal its intimate history so vividly. There are documents, pictures, the original instruments and, critically, the hand written music from which the musicians played. It provides a window into the life of a distant and unique musical institution we even know with a good degree of precision what it sounded like. The music is hand written and bespoke for the individual players. It would have made no sense for the parts to have been written in any way other than to fit the style and competences of the people who had to play them: as such, it comes close to an autobiography of the practices that created music making of unprecedented sophistication in Wales. The band was an outsider to what became known in Britain as the amateur brass band ‘movement’ , even though its famously successful appearance at the National Brass Band Contest at the Crystal Palace in 1860 might suggest the contrary. It didn’t subscribe to the practices and musical values that typified Victorian working class brass bands elsewhere. It was unique and isolated, with its own idiomatic musical identity and exercising values that served a very particular set of musical and cultural purposes.

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