The Cincinnati Brass Band is tooting its own horn with conductor Ben Chamberlain positioning the group to be Cincinnati’s latest winning team.
Before we get to that, let’s back that brass up.
Maybe Cincinnatians don’t know that the Cincinnati Brass Band is the official brass band of the city of Cincinnati and that it is a competitive outfit.
Or they might not know that the city has an official brass band, or what a brass band is.
Chamberlain is here with answers.
The conductor, who has a day job as an associate professor at Xavier University and a doctorate in music from Northwestern University, took over the Cincinnati Brass Band in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. It was the first extracurricular music gig he took since moving to town. He’s a fan of brass bands and Cincinnati’s in particular.
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“Brass bands come straight out of a British tradition,” he explains. “It’s really interesting. They were started as corporate entities during the industrial revolution in the early-to-mid 1800s, and these companies started brass bands as a way to enrich the lives of their workers. It was kind of like an after-work club and a constructive cultural endeavor for the workers. Competition was a really big deal from the very beginning. Brass bands have always been highly competitive.
“We have our own musical tradition in the U.S., but only in the last couple of decades has the British brass band tradition caught on here, and there are some really excellent groups throughout the country.”
Bill Harvey of Buddy Rogers Music started the Cincinnati Brass Band in 1993. Chamberlain credits Harvey’s continued support through Buddy Rogers for keeping the band going, and also praises original band conductor Anita Cocker Hunt, who remains a member of the group playing cornet, as his “sage.”
“The professionals and semi-professionals who play in this particular brass band are extraordinary musicians and extraordinarily dedicated to the group,” Chamberlain says. “As a college band director, I get to work with some outstanding students. But this was my first chance to work with highly capable, highly accomplished adults who wanted to make music at the highest level.”
Instrumentation is a defining characteristic of a brass band. The predominant brass instrument is conical, such as a French horn, as opposed to the cylindrical bore of a trombone. While there are trombones in the brass band, they are outnumbered, and the conical instruments create a sound that ranges from “really, really powerful” to “lyrical and mellow and sweet,” as Chamberlain describes it.
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“Brass band fans and the uninitiated are really taken by that sound. It doesn’t sound like anything else,” Chamberlain says. “Our repertoire includes some really special works written specifically for the brass band. However, if you come to see us at our summer concert series, you’re going to hear John Philip Sousa, and you’re going to hear Leonard Bernstein and John Williams movie music, and so we can also play all kinds of things that are very familiar and engaging to our audience.”
Chamberlain and the band have been rehearsing in preparation for the competition season. On March 26, the Cincinnati Brass Band heads to suburban Ohio for the Dublin Festival of Brass. Then comes the big one: The North American Brass Band Championships in Huntsville, Alabama, April 29-30.
Is Chamberlain’s crew going to kick some brass and make Cincinnati proud? You bet your conical horn.
“I would say that in my first year with the group, I am extremely proud of the work they’re doing. The members of the group who have been with the group for a long time are extremely proud of the work they're doing,” he says. “And I would say we have very high hopes for how we’re gonna do competitively.”
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