Bert Bailey:

>I heard on the radio some time ago the astonishing claim that in the early
>1900s there were no less than 20,000 village (possibly colliery?) brass
>bands in existence in rural England ...

Yes, of course D H Lawrence was the son of a coal-miner and wrote a lot
about the mining villages and their communities, and the uneducated miners'
intense love of art, nature and amateur music-making.  The great amateur
choral societies, too, seem to have flourished in the industrial areas of
Liverpool, Huddersfield etc.

I wonder if that also happened in the Klondike?

Perhaps there's a connection between music and dirt, or music and hard
manual labour? Does a love of music among the masses have to be forged
in the crucible of poverty, hard labour, dirt, slavery? In England at
least, there are still brass bands among the (now almost totally redundant)
coal-miners and steel-workers, not to mention the Ford and other car
factories.  I wonder what the production workers in the microchip assembly
plants, where I understand the air has to be 10,000 times cleaner than the
air in a hospital operating theatre, do in their spare time? Have they yet
formed the Intel Brass Band, the Microsoft Choral Society, or even the IBM
Whippet Appreciation Society And Glee Club?

Alan Moss
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