4. Band: Part I

I remember once watching my grandfather in his old age reading a piece of music.  He’d been asked to critique it and at this point in his life he was almost entirely deaf.  When a curious young me asked what he was doing he explained that he was reading the music and in that doing so he could hear it.  All the melodies, harmonies, each instrument in its place and all of the parts.  In his minds-eye was a personal, imagined and perfect symphony.  An orchestra of brass telling a secret story written in ledgers of clefs and notes that only he could listen to.  His ears didn’t work anymore, and he couldn’t hear… but he could hear.  I was truly fascinated. 

I wasn’t raised with band, but it was life for mother’s family:  Grandad played trombone for Mosgiel and Kaikorai Brass Bands.  Grandma was on the committee, and then later secretary for Mosgiel.  She was also on the Otago & Southland Brass Bands Association committee and the Chief Supervisor for all their contests.  Grandad also became conductor for Mosgiel and taught.  Mum played baritone.  Her brother played euphonium. 

Band.  Band.  Band.

“When there was a competition coming up, grandad would be in the bedroom practicing his part, [mum’s brother] would be in the lounge doing his, and your mother would set up in the kitchen.   It was an enormous noise.”  Grandma recalls.  “She used to use a Dictaphone to record herself playing so that she could listen back and pick up what she needed to work on.  We had a canary in the kitchen then, and the canary would pick up on the melody and sing along with her.  You could hear him singing along on the Dictaphone tape.”

They travelled around the country for competitions, and from what I know things got rowdy.  “When she was at band, she was one of the boys.” Her high school friend L says.  It was a vastly different version of the quiet schoolgirl who was described to me by most of her teenage friends.  “They would go out on the booze and everything.  Once I went with her to the pub with the band guys.  We were only about 16.” 

From what I know, and I don’t know much, Band booze-ups were wild.  But when it came to the obsession with Band itself, L admits she “…just didn’t get it.”  It wasn’t ‘cool’ to be in a brass band.  But clearly mum either didn’t care, didn’t have a choice, or both.  I do know that she very much-loved music.  And as much as I didn’t understand the whole Band thing myself as a kid because mum wasn’t here to raise us with it, whenever we stayed at grandma and grandads house, there was always a glimpse of it somewhere, at every moment in time.  Brass on the radio.  Band practices to go along to listen to before a contest (N.B. I always thought the saliva puddles on the gymnasium floors were awful).  Grandad going to teach.  Grandma going to a meeting.  A retired trombone with all its silver polished to a buttery perfection lived ornamentally on a dresser in the spare bedroom. When grandad died in the mid-2000’s, a trophy was donated in his name to the Otago Southland Association.  Grandad was kind of a big deal in the world of brass in the south from what I gather.

My mother, a quite schoolgirl to her teenage friends. A romantic. Head-down, tail-up.  Diligent…

But as a Baritone in Blue? One of the boys.  Brass.  Beers at the pub… I was confused as to how my mother could be so polar-oppositely described to me by different people who knew her at the same time during her high school years. 

Which one was she?  Was she all of them?  And seriously, did she even like Band, or was she there because her heritage said she had to be?

To be continued…

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