Our music/our world: wind bands and local social life

Abstract

The focus of this book is on wind bands, institutions that have played an important role in the lives of people from different geographies for decades. In the 21st century, wind bands of mixed woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments represent a musical phenomenon that has spread far beyond “Western” culture. The cultural, economic and social changes brought about 1830 – several brass instruments were only available after the inventions of Sax or Wieprecht – and the impact of militarization, colonization, and missionary work helped to disseminate wind band traditions, while technological innovations and mass manufacturing made musical instruments more accessible to amateur musicians all over the world (Herbert 2000, Reily and Brucher 2013). The portability of wind, brass, and percussion instruments, combined with the legacy of their use in military, governmental, and church rituals, made bands particularly adaptable to widely different performing contexts, shaping and reshaping local sound landscapes. This book illustrates the co-existence of two main lines of knowledge production about wind bands. The first places wind bands in top-down actions of disciplining the popular or of ‘cultural democratization’ (Rincón Rodriguez 2019), understanding the music the bands play as a reflex, or subordination of ‘Western’ classical music or of military music. The second focuses on processes of construction, negotiation, and social transformation, and seeks the terms of analysis from within the conceptual and evaluative field of each band, or of the cultural and social dynamics that they generate. Finally, this book highlighs the significance of bands since 19th-century until nowadays: they have generated -and still continues to be generated- new repertoires, new listening practices, and new musical and social urban practices, builiding soundscapes and developing a strong musical culture.