Hidden musicians

In 2015, academic staff at Queen’s University in Belfast, led by the Dean of Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Michael Alcorn, started compiling the first comprehensive archive about brass bands in Ireland from 1850. In BBW’s June edition, Professor Alcorn reveals the hitherto uncharted, but significant role that Ireland played in the brass band movement

Such histories that exist of the origins of the brass band movement in the UK focus on the key developments in England, Wales and Scotland. They rightly acknowledge the significance of events, such as the Crystal Palace contests in London or the contests at Belle Vue, Manchester, as symbols of the vitality and relevance of banding in late 19th-century Great Britain (GB), and trace the development of bands, repertoire and contests with reference to social and economic change, innovations in instrument building, the evolution of the publishing industry and the ecology of the banding movement itself.  

References to brass bands in Ireland are largely omitted. Where they exist, they are swept up in broad surveys of banding from the 1950s to the 1970s across the British Isles, and include only a handful of bands like Templemore and Agnes Street from Belfast, and the Steadfast Band from Dublin, which regularly participated in the main GB contests. Without a wider context being provided, one is left wondering about the origins of banding in Ireland, the similarities with and differences from banding in Great Britain, and the historical factors that shaped the evolution of the movement in Ireland…

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Photo: Professor Michael Alcorn