Brass Bands of the World: Militarism, Colonial Legacies, and Local Music Making ed. by Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher (review)

Brass Bands of the World takes advantage of both archival research and ethnographic accounts to construct histories of a global phenomenon—brass bands—in a historical ethnomusicological framework. Editors Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher succeed in bringing together disparate places—England, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, the U.S.A., South Africa, Portugal, Northern Ireland, and Mexico—through a shared history of band music and experience by using two key theoretical frameworks: “place and space” and “banding.” Framing the book with place and space is quite helpful in stringing together band traditions that have considerable differences in history, circumstance, and function. In the introduction, Reily and Brucher use Michel de Certeau’s theories (The Practice of Everyday Life [trans. Steven Rendall; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984]) to understand such ideas and write that “place is constituted by the ordering of elements in a particular location; it is, therefore, a static entity, a reification. Space, on the other hand, comes into being, [de Certeau] claims, through the ways in which it is used and transformed by these uses” (p. 18). Each chapter speaks to these ideas while bringing forward additional ideas mediated through “banding,” another useful theoretical frame. This concept, borrowed from Ruth Finnegan (The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007]), looks not only to musical competencies, but also to the social aspects of a band community. Brass Bands of the World then considers bands as functional spaces through musicking, socialization, and embodiment.

It is difficult to group separate case studies due to differences in historical processes and geographic flows; the editors therefore opt not to use subsections. It is clear, however, that the progression of thought inherently goes from “Europe and the development of the military band prototype to colonial expansion to processes of localization” (p. 27). Subsections emerge with common themes linking chapters together: chapters 1 through 3 explore ideas of nationalism; chapters 4 and 5 look to the complexities of maintaining tradition; chapters 6 and 7 are linked with the idea of place manifested through banding; and chapters 8 and 9 each deal with the mobility of band traditions.

The first subsection, examining themes of nationalism, comprises three chapters. In chapter 1, Trevor Herbert contemplates the idea of “banding” by examining brass and military bands of British origin as “performance domains,” which he describes as durable musical entities shaped by their performance practice more than by any linear historical evolution. With that, he contends that since brass and military bands in Britain have had little change in their fundamentals and structure since their inceptions in the nineteenth century, they can be considered emerging in “finished form” (p. 34). Herbert asserts that the conception of military bands in British armies had more to do with artistic patronage by the officer classes than with any notions of military strategy (p. 40) and this led to ceremonial use, a trait later spread throughout the world.

Sarah McClimon, in chapter 2, contends that the history of military bands in Japan was seen as a necessary tool for modernization and a building block for strength in the burgeoning empire. “The Western-style military band in Japan, with its diverse choices of repertoire incorporating Euro-American and Japanese elements, shaped an image of Japan as modern and cosmopolitan, yet rooted in a mythical ancient past” (p. 56). McClimon notes that military music was incorporated by choice rather than through any form of colonization. This allowed Western music and Japanese sensibilities to better marry in a form that suited Japan’s efforts to modernize while holding fast to tradition.

Heejin Kim details the importation and appropriation of brass bands based on Western models into South Korea both before and after Japanese occupation and the Korean War...