In October​ I went to the Royal Albert Hall to watch the final of the National Brass Band Championships. Each of the nineteen finalists plays a fiendishly difficult test piece to a half-full hall and three judges, who sit in a black-curtained pen so they can’t see which band is performing. Edward Gregson’s twenty-minute Symphony in Two Movements is ‘serious’ brass music – as opposed to marches and bandstand fare – written to challenge the most accomplished amateur players. The first movement is a toccata, opening with bold chords played in unison accompanied by hammering percussion and surging towards an abruptly quiet conclusion. The longer second movement takes the form of a theme and variations. It peaks with a frenetic build-up to a massive tam-tam crash before a more meditative section, but the relief is short-lived and the symphony finishes even more thunderously than it begins. By the fifth listen, the music had become oppressive and disorienting. I felt like I would be listening to it for ever. The competition format means that only the most fanatical supporters watch the whole contest.

The final is the top layer in a highly organised structure. The bands here were competing in the ‘championship section’; the finals for the four lower sections were held at Cheltenham racecourse a month earlier. Each band at the Albert Hall had qualified in its region – more difficult in the North, Wales and Yorkshire (which is its own region), where competition is much fiercer. There are strict regulations to prevent the borrowing of players from bands in higher sections, though some bands circumvent them by importing ringers from Europe or the military. Players used to have to state their occupation to ensure that no professional musicians competed. Amateurism remains important: band members don’t play for the money. First prize at the Albert Hall was £2000, which would barely buy a decent euphonium.

The auditorium filled up for the seventh rendition. Everyone wanted to hear Black Dyke, one of the country’s oldest and most successful bands, which was founded in 1855. Like all the best bands, it’s based in Yorkshire. In many ways, it’s a model brass band: a small village group, originally associated with the local textile mill. The band embraces its ambassadorial role: its website describes its outreach and teaching efforts, and lists recordings and Proms appearances. Some people buy into the idea that, like the Vienna Philharmonic, Black Dyke has a signature sound – though in the bar of the Albert Hall other competitors were sceptical. Even so, its performance won the biggest cheers of the day.

The other candidate for most famous band comes even closer to the archetype. Grimethorpe Colliery Band’s story of victory in the face of personal and communal struggle during the closure of the village’s pit in the early 1990s inspired the film Brassed Off (1996), which uses renditions of ‘Danny Boy’ and the William Tell Overture, recorded by the Grimethorpe band, to push all the right sentimental buttons, and cemented the image of brass band players as heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking working men from the industrial North, defeating despair and the loss of their livelihoods through competitive banding.

As Black Dyke left the stage, its conductor, Nicholas Childs, shook hands with his brother, Robert, the director of the organisation running the contest. Robert has played in, conducted and judged these contests for decades; Nicholas conducted three of the bands in the final during qualification. Many bands rely on similar dynasties. My neighbour on the left at the Albert Hall was supporting the defending champions, Flowers, from Gloucester, whose back row cornet was the daughter of someone in her own local band. Flowers’s victory would also be a victory for the band that raised the cornet player.

The first brass band contests were held in the 1850s. The early proponent Enderby Jackson, inspired by agricultural shows, saw commercial value in encouraging competition between the brass ensembles that had started to appear across the country. Contests were originally designed to entertain, with bands playing arrangements of orchestral music and opera medleys. There is still a sense of spectacle. Until recently, contests had a ‘deportment’ prize, awarded to the band that stood up and sat down as one and held its instruments at the same angle. Band uniforms are old-fashioned, formal and vaguely military, typically pairing black trousers, shoes and bow ties with a gold-trimmed cropped jacket and a wide, brightly coloured lapel. Some bands wear cummerbunds. At the finals Leyland Band, from Lancashire, wore white jackets with a red rose in the buttonhole; Aldbourne, from Wiltshire, matched its socks to its bright red jackets. Many bands have two uniforms: one for the stage and one for ‘walking out’, a more casual outfit (in my old band it resembled a school uniform, with a blazer and striped tie) worn on arrival at a competition, backstage and in the pub.

The competition calendar includes formats that aren’t judged blind, where spectacle counts for more. In these ‘entertainment’ contests bands choose their own programmes, typically featuring showpieces, marches, Salvation Army pieces, attempts at jazz and cheesy arrangements of pop songs (I quite like the brass band version of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but I’m not sure it’s what Freddie Mercury had in mind). They often follow a narrative, and incorporate bawdy humour, costumes and even choreography – there are clear similarities with pantomime. There are also marching contests such as Whit Friday, when more than a hundred boozed-up bands descend on Saddleworth Moor.

People have made fun of brass band competitions since they began. ‘Musical Prize Fight’, published in Dickens’s All the Year Round in 1859, gives an account of a pub contest held in ‘one of those remote refuges which Nature has provided for bathers who are tired of even the moderate gaiety of Worthing’. The author isn’t impressed: ‘To say that the performance of these difficult pieces approached perfection would only convey an untruth, but it far exceeded the ordinary standard of civilisation existing at the places from which the bands were drawn.’ The Yorkshireman who conducts Bellini, he argues, is unlikely ‘to bite off his neighbour’s ear’ and will therefore have a ‘humanising influence’ on his ‘less cultivated brethren’. Many bands were started by factory owners in the belief that music would give their workers purpose, strengthen social bonds and discourage violence and disorder. Outside the industrial heartlands, many bands had military origins (hence the fondness for marching) or were associated with religious groups; members tended to be working class, which is still largely the case today.

Brass bands display a resistance to the classical mainstream, combined uneasily with a desire to be accepted by the musical elite. Using the Royal Albert Hall for their most prestigious competition projects the idea that success means acceptance into that elite, but although orchestral brass sections are peppered with musicians who cut their teeth in brass bands, cornet players often abandon their instrument in favour of professional trumpet work (cornets had a brief heyday in the late 19th-century orchestral repertoire, but they’re mostly absent now).

The struggle between independence and assimilation is most pronounced in the repertoire. In the early 20th century, promoters tried to elevate the brass band’s cultural standing by persuading famous composers to write test pieces. Holst, Elgar, Ireland and Vaughan Williams all wrote for brass band, but rarely more than once. This year’s test pieces were by Gregson, former principal of the Royal Northern College of Music, who is known for his brass band works, and Arthur Bliss, who isn’t (Bliss’s pieces were played by the lower sections in their finals). By calling his piece a ‘symphony’, Gregson was deliberately evoking an established musical form; in the programme note he says it was influenced by Beethoven and Mahler. These references escaped me. By the thirteenth listen, I couldn’t bring to mind Beethoven or Mahler: I had forgotten what other music sounded like. Test pieces are often indistinguishable, since they all offer the same challenges: fast rhythms, high notes, hard to tune chords, odd time signatures and tricky melodies.

One factor that both makes the music distinctive and puts off mainstream composers is the uniformity of tone colour that is a consequence of the instrumentation being limited to brass and percussion. Composers have also objected to what Vaughan Williams described in a note accompanying his own brass band work, the Henry V Overture, as bands’ use of a ‘vulgar sentimental vibrato’. He wanted trumpets rather than cornets to be used in his piece. Cornets are tuned at the same pitch as trumpets (B flat) but are more compact and have a conical bore – the tubing gradually widens from mouthpiece to bell, which gives them a mellower sound. A brass band has nine of them and one soprano cornet, pitched in E flat. Their invention in France in the 1820s was vital for the brass band: cornets-à-pistons used the new technology of the piston valve, which meant they were both fully chromatic (before then, only the trombone and the clunky keyed trumpet could play every note of a chromatic scale) and could be mass-produced cheaply. In this period, bands included a range of novel instruments, such as the ophicleide, a precursor to the tuba which looks like an upturned traffic cone with saxophone-style keys.

The brass band sound owes most to the Belgian Adolphe Sax, whose designs in the mid-19th century also included the Saxocannon, a Wellsian weapon of mass destruction, and the Saxotonnerre, a locomotive-powered organ intended to be loud enough to be heard across Paris. The brass band includes instruments from the ‘Saxhorn’ family, from tubas (in E flat and hulking double B flat) and euphoniums to baritone and tenor horns. Saxhorns are also conically bored, which gives the brass band its dark tone colour. Three trombones complete the line-up.

My neighbour in the Albert Hall asked about my banding credentials. I told her that, deemed too small to play the trumpet, I had played the cornet in local youth bands in Hampshire, later competing in the championships, first and second sections. These days I mostly stick to the trumpet, only bringing out the cornet when bands twist my arm. I told her I was wary of agreeing to go to ‘just one rehearsal’, because it often turned into gruelling contest prep. Disappointed, she asked if I’d considered joining the army.

Listening to band sixteen, the Co-operation Band, one of only two conducted by a woman, I thought about the reasons my cornet stays in its case. I hated the tedium and misery of contest days, months of rehearsal culminating in a long day in a slightly grotty hall in a dreary town, with hours of waiting followed by the inevitable commiserations in the pub. I don’t want to commit so many hours to a piece of music I usually don’t even like. The playing itself is demanding: at the end of a test piece my lip throbs from puckering up for high notes and I feel dazed, breathless and deafened. In an orchestra I mostly play long notes or brief fanfares, and have plenty of time to recover. I also dislike banding’s macho pub culture. As teenagers, my sister and I were once praised with the words, ‘you played like men.’

I had no idea which band would win. I wasn’t alone: on 4barsrest, a website dedicated to brass bands, no one predicted the result. It was apparently also a surprise to the winner, Desford Colliery Band, which seemed to have been summoned back from the pub for a victory photo. After the final, the bands started preparing for Christmas, the time of year when the rest of the country notices their existence, as they play carols in supermarkets and on high streets. The next major contest is the European Championships in Linz in April, where Flowers (the highest-ranked English band at the 2024 British Open) will compete against Scandinavian, Belgian and Swiss bands that have adopted this strange British tradition.