The appointment of Chris McDonald as science minister caught my attention for an unexpected reason: he’s a brass band musician, having performed with the Easington Colliery Band and the Durham Miners’ Association Brass Band. It reminded me how peculiar the British brass band world actually is. Chris has been known to discuss banding in parliamentary debates at the slightest opportunity, and he gave an entertaining interview on LBC about his passion for the hobby.
The Competition Structure
Anyone familiar with British brass banding has likely seen Brassed Off, the film loosely based on Grimethorpe Colliery Band winning the National Championships in 1992, just days after the colliery itself closed. Unlike other musical pursuits where winning a competition might be a pleasant irrelevance, competitive brass banding is serious business. Results determine promotion and relegation between sections—championship, first, second, third, and fourth—much like a football league system. Success unlocks prestige and makes recruiting better players easier.
To reach the Nationals, a band must place well in its Area Championship. The UK is divided into eight banding areas: West, London and South, Midlands, Wales, North West, Yorkshire, North, and Scotland. Competing requires performing the required test piece for that section in that year. Every band has the same nominal 28-player lineup, and the format reduces variables by marking a single piece in a single arrangement. Bands rehearse their test piece hundreds of times to achieve the best response from adjudicators.
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How Judging Works
Adjudicators are typically very experienced players or band leaders, making this a form of peer review. They sit in a sealed box where they cannot see which band is performing, ensuring blind assessment. Bands are placed in order within their section based on the rubric produced by the Association of Brass Band Adjudicators. The criteria cover everything from fundamental musicianship and band cohesiveness to what the rubric calls the “wow” factor of exceptional quality or interpretation.
The system takes a creative endeavor and makes it behave like a competitive team sport. Brassed Off romanticizes miners from a small village working and playing together, but in reality there’s a transfer market where the best players seek to move—often great distances—to better bands or better seats within bands. Principal cornet is a much bigger deal than playing on the back row, and first chair is preferable to second.
The pressure and high expectations around competition can make culture toxic. Good bands take measures to address this, especially among junior players, but there is still work to be done.
No band survives on competition alone: local concerts and tours require a much wider repertoire, and attracting audiences helps sustain the dwindling number of bands in the UK.
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Rankings and External Perspective
A competitive environment with limited results that matter creates fertile ground for a parallel league table industry. Other competitions provide practice and prize money, but their results get statistically massaged into various rankings that people obsess over. There’s even mythology about whether the order in which bands play affects rankings—something confidently argued by some but difficult to verify.
Competition fundamentally shares out limited resources, with more going to the most deserving or proficient. Money matters, but so do esteem and profile. The Research Excellence Framework used in universities allocates funding and lets departments demonstrate prowess to potential collaborators. Brass band winners access bigger concerts, recording contracts, and attract better players as a result of their success.
If competition is necessary, it needs to be universally perceived as fair. Peer judgment is generally seen as fairer than abstract targets, though accusations of bias occasionally surface. Measures like anonymisation and blind assessment help address this. The assessment must also fairly reflect the actual ability of the department or band itself—temporary hires or international dep players can distort analysis of everyday excellence.
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Academia has moved ahead of the brass band world in explicitly looking for a healthy and supportive culture in assessing quality. It has also widened what kinds of evidence are acceptable to drive innovation and accessibility. Other brass band competitions do include “own choice” repertoire, but the Area Championships and Nationals do not.
The downside of peer review is that competition becomes an industry or community talking to itself. As a non-expert, I have no way of knowing whether the current UK champion band—Desford Colliery—is the best band to listen to, or merely the best at playing Gregson’s “Symphony in Two Movements.” REF has an advantage here by building in a reckoning of impact outside the academic world itself.
The comparison is imperfect. One involves a niche activity accreting an enormously complex assessment process that can obsess people to an unhealthy extent and potentially harm creativity and innovation. The other is the world of British brass banding. But where competition serves a purpose in helping people become the best they can, there is value in stepping back from the data and considering the wider implications of the incentives being created.
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