Conceptualizing Brass Music as Popular Music
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.33363Keywords:
brass bands, popular music, brass music, marching bands, music and colonialism, New Orleans musicAbstract
As a relatively stable and predictable cultural formation, the brass band is an idiomatic ensemble of wind and percussion instruments originally organized by militaries, governments, churches, and other formal institutions. Yet brass bands have consistently morphed and permutated according to the dynamic interplay of particular historical, cultural, social, and political conditions. Surveying the efflorescence of brass band performance and scholarship since the 1980s, I suggest that a revised understanding of “the popular” appears to underlie both. If the brass band was once antithetical to purified notions of both art music and folk music, the ensemble’s
association with popular music helps resolve those tensions by dissolving or at least blurring the lines between categories. The article begins with by reviewing key terms and ideas that have formed a conceptual map of brass band performance and research. I then conclude with a reflection on the “Brass Band Renaissance” in New Orleans as an example of popular music in mass circulation.
References
Álvarez, Ricardo and Paulina Bronfman. 2023. “Banda Dignidad: Carnival, Artivism and Liminality in the Chilean Social Outbreak of October 2019”. In Music and Resistance: From 1900 to the Present, edited by Igor Contreras Zubillaga and Helena Martín- Nieva, 317–38. Turnhout: Brepols.
Baines, Anthony. 1976. Brass Instruments: Their History and Development. London: Faber.
Boonzajer Flaes, Robert M. 2000 [1993]. Brass Unbound: Secret Children of the Colonial Brass Band. 2nd rev. edn. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute.
Booth, Gregory D. 1990. “Brass Bands: Tradition, Change, and the Mass Media in Indian Wedding Music”. Ethnomusicology 34/2: 245–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/851685
Bowles, Edmund A. 2006. “The Impact of Turkish Military Bands on European Court Festivals in the 17th and 18th Centuries”. Early Music 34/4: 533–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cal103
Brothers, Thomas David. 2006. Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans. 1st edn. New York: W.W. Norton.
Burns, Mick. 2006. Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Constant, Denis. 1986. “Dirty Dozen Brass Band”. Jazz Magazine 352 (25F) (July– August): 11 (translated from French).
DeCoste, Kyle. 2017. “Street Queens: New Orleans Brass Bands and the Problem of Intersectionality”. Ethnomusicology 61/2: 181–206. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.61.2.0181
Durkheim, Émile. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press.
Farmer, Henry George. 1912. The Rise and Development of Military Music. London: Wm. Reeves.
Feld, Steven. 1988. “Notes on World Beat”. Public Culture 1/1: 31–37. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-1-1-31
Finnegan, Ruth. 1989. The Hidden Musicians: Music- Making in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garofalo, Reebee, Erin T. Allen and Andrew Snyder, eds. 2020. HONK!: A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism. New York: Routledge.
Gould, Elizabeth. 2012. “Re-Membering Bands in North America: Gendered Paradoxes and Potentialities”. In Critical Perspectives in Canadian Music Education, edited by Carol A. Beynon and Karl K. Veblen, 101–22. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Herbert, Trevor. 2000 [1991]. The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press.
Herbert, Trevor and Margaret Sarkissian. 1997. “Victorian Bands and Their Dissemination in the Colonies”. Popular Music 16/2: 165–79. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143000000350
Keil, Charles. 1987. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music”. Cultural Anthropology 2/3: 275–83. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1987.2.3.02a00010
Keil, Charles. 2013. “Foreword”. In Brass Bands of the World: Militarism, Colonial Legacies, and Local Music Making, edited by Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher, xiii–xx. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
McNeill, William Hardy. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Politz, Sarah. 2018. “‘People of Allada, This Is Our Return’: Indexicality, Multiple Temporalities, and Resonance in the Music of the Gangbé Brass Band of Benin”. Ethnomusicology 62/1: 28–57. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.62.1.0028
Proksch, Bryan and George C. Foreman, eds. 2024. Bands in American Musical History: Inflection Points and Reappraisals. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.
Reily, Suzel Ana and Katherine Brucher, eds. 2013. Brass Bands of the World: Militarism, Colonial Legacies, and Local Music Making. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1913 [1762]. On The Social Contract. New York: E.P. Dutton.
Sachs, Curt. 1940. The History of Musical Instruments. New York: Norton.
Sakakeeny, Matt. 2010. “‘Under the Bridge’: An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans”. Ethnomusicology 54/1: 1–27. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.54.1.0001
Sakakeeny, Matt. 2013. “The Representational Power of the New Orleans Brass Band”. In Brass Bands of the World: Militarism, Colonialism, and Local Music Making, edited by Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher, 123–37. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Sakakeeny, Matt. 2024. “Music, Sound, Politics”. Annual Review of Anthropology 53/1: 309–29. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041422-011840
Silverman, Carol. 2011. “Gypsy Music, Hybridity and Appropriation: Balkan Dilemmas of Postmodernity”. Ethnologia Balkanica 15: 15–32.
Simonett, Helena. 2001. Banda: Mexican Musical Life across Borders. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Snyder, Andrew. 2019. “Playing the System: The Capitalist Industry of Participatory Music Education in Rio de Janeiro’s Oficinas”. Journal of Popular Music Studies 31/3: 119–44. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313011
Snyder, Andrew. 2021. “Carnival Brass Bands in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro: Disinheritance, Alternative Whiteness, and Musical Eclecticism”. Ethnomusicology 65/3: 519–48. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.65.3.0519
Snyder, Andrew. 2022. Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Steinbrecher, Bernhard and Bernhard Achhorner. 2020. “‘Boundlessly Different’: Popular Brass Music in Austria”. Journal of Popular Music Studies 32/4: 118–47. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2020.32.4.118
Taussig, Michael T. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge.
Townley, Eric. 1985. “Dirty Dozen Brass Band”. Jazz Journal International 38/3 (March): 26.
Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
White, Michael. 2001. “The New Orleans Brass Band: A Cultural Tradition”. In The Triumph of the Soul: Cultural and Psychological Aspects of African American Music, edited by Ferdinand Jones and Arthur C. Jones, 69–96. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Zwerin, Michael. 1985. “An 8- Man Brass Band Revival Movement”. International Herald Tribune, 20 November: 10.
