After I left school I was fortunate to be enlisted by the Glasgow School’s Music Department as a French Horn teacher and, as part of that I attended the Concert Band summer camp as Horn Tutor for five years. The best horn players went to the First or Second Orchestra camps so it was, in general, the younger players who were in the Concert Band – although some preferred that style of music.
The camp lasted around ten or eleven days at the start of the school holidays and culminated in a concert in the location where the camp was held – the concert was repeated in the autumn in Glasgow after a weekend of ‘refresher’ rehearsals. I made a lot of friends during those weeks and apart from playing with the concert band itself, there was plenty of opportunity for making music with others on the staff.
One of the other brass tutors for some of those camps was Derick Kane who looked after the trombones. There was also the clarinet tutor – Solly Banks – who also did a great jazz guitar and we had numerous late night jam sessions in the staffroom.
There was a lot of music played, but the Holst suites for wind band always stick in my memory as they were used more than once. The movement I have linked to is the final movement of the second suite “Fantasia on the Dargason”. If you don’t know this it is jolly music.
The video that I found to link to is also great – I always like it when I serendipitously find something – the ‘animation’ here is wonderful – I particularly like the bits where 3/4 is set against the 6/8 rhythm. This was a bit that always tested the skills of the young players! I told the horn players that at least it wasn’t quite as bad as when I was in the First Orchestra at Castle Toward playing Scheherazade where in the last movement there are simultaneous 2/8, 6/16 and 3/8 time signatures and apart from the notes you have in any bar there were no clues as to which time signature you were supposed to be playing at any given time. 🤔