Hear the passion

What do a Welsh male voice choir and a Yorkshire brass band have in common? More than you might think, writes SUE WILSON

AS pipe bands are to Scotland, so brass bands are to Northern England – Yorkshire, in particular – and male voice choirs to Wales. Not only is each the best known musical emblem of its locality and culture, embodying its own combination of social and historical factors – and adapting today to rapidly changing circumstances – but all three are subject to similarly sniffy disparagement from self-styled "art" music grandees, epitomised in Sir Thomas Beecham's infamous remark that "brass bands are all very well in their place – outdoors and several miles away".

It's clearly not a sentiment shared by the 1,200 fans who long ago snapped up every last ticket to see the Black Dyke Band in Perth on Saturday – nor by artists including Peter Gabriel, Tori Amos, The Beautiful South and Elton John, all of whom have performed or recorded with this 153-year-old West Yorkshire outfit. Indeed, even the sternest of classical hearts has been known to melt at the magically sonorous, radiantly blended sound of a good brass band – an emotional impact memorably deployed in the 1996 Ewan MacGregor movie Brassed Off.

"Earlier this year we recorded Elgar's Severn Suite with Sir Colin Davis, president of the London Symphony Orchestra," recalls the Black Dyke's musical director, Nicholas Childs. "I remember absolutely how the musicians responded to his every word and gesture – and at the end of the session, he applauded them."

For while brass banding may remain a strictly amateur pursuit, Childs points out: "Nowadays it's amateur in the Olympic sense: 90 per cent of our members have music degrees." Numerous top orchestral brass players have emerged from the brass band scene, while the Black Dyke's other achievements, as arguably the most famous name in its field, include being the first such ensemble ever to play the Carnegie Hall in New York and at London's Royal College of Music.

"Because the scene is still so much based around competitions," Childs says, "the best bands play at an incredibly high technical level. Musically, too, the repertoire is much more ambitious than a lot of people think. The Black Dyke is holding its own festival in Leeds next month, and we'll be performing eight world premieres, in among music by 12 living composers. On the education side, we recently set up a Yorkshire-wide youth band to tutor new players from across the county, so we could feed our experience and expertise back into the wider community. And it's all without a penny of Arts Council funding. We get by without, of course, but a bit more recognition would be nice."

There are no such worries currently clouding the horizons of the Fron Male Voice Choir, from Froncysyllte, Llangollen in Wales, who'll be performing at Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall next month. Not since they were spotted singing at a wedding by Daniel Glatman, former manager of boy band Blue, and promptly signed to Universal Classics and Jazz, home to such crossover stars as Jamie Cullum, Katherine Jenkins and our own Nicola Benedetti. Their 2006 debut for the label went gold within three days – aided by an appearance on the Parkinson Christmas special – outselling every other classical album that year and entering the pop Top 10.

It also earned them a Classical Brit nomination, as did last year's platinum-selling follow-up, Voices of the Valley – thus currently pitting them in the popular vote against the Band of the Royal Scots Dragoons, ahead of the ceremony in May.

Between times, the Fron produced the now-obligatory nude calendar, in aid of Help the Aged, and have seen the rights to their story optioned by leading Hollywood producer Zygi Kamasa, whose credits include Bend It Like Beckham and George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. The writer of Confetti, Debbie Isitt – who also authored the Ricky Tomlinson feature Nasty Neighbours – is reportedly handling the screenplay.

"As well as Parkinson, we've been on the Paul O'Grady Show, and Ready Steady Cook; we've recorded with the Prague Symphony Orchestra, and at the Brits we were pipped into second place by a young lad called Paul McCartney," jokes the choir's chairman Dave Jones. "It's been heady stuff."

The recent histories of both the Black Dyke Band and the Fron Choir are a far cry indeed from their music's respective origins. Brass bands and male voice choirs both first emerged, indeed, out of very similar historical circumstances, albeit combined in each case with particular local influences.

Brass bands are the hybrid offspring partly of military bands, partly of the municipal troupes of musicians known as "waits", who served as both town guards and heralds. After Adolphe Sax perfected his three-valve system around 1850, unlocking the full chromatic scale, the ensuing standardisation of brass instruments was further encouraged by the rapid proliferation of band competitions, largely enshrining the 27-piece format that remains the norm today. The only major 20th-century innovation in this respect came with the official acceptance of percussion in 1952, following a controversial contest during that year's Edinburgh Festival.

Wales, of course, is famous as a land of singers, whose native harmonic propensities were noted as long ago as the 12th century. "In their musical concerts they do not sing in unison like the inhabitants of other countries, but in many different parts," wrote the early historian Geraldus Cambrensis in The Description of Wales. "You will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers, who all at length unite with organic melody."

From the mid-18th century, collective singing was increasingly shaped by the nonconformist religious movements that flourished throughout Wales, with classic hymns from this period still a staple of the male voice choir repertoire. Bands and choirs alike, however, are fundamentally a product of the industrial revolution and Victorian philanthropy, established by the owners of collieries, mills and factories as a cheap and wholesome form of recreation for their workforce, intended to divert them from such "evils" as the alehouse and the nascent trade union movement.

According to historian Basil Philips, describing the Welsh coalfields' role as one of the British Empire's primary economic engines, "a man looked for four things coming to work in the pits. A roof over his family's head, a chapel, a men's choir, and a rugby team." In England's northern manufacturing heartland, meanwhile, different works' brass bands commanded fierce local loyalties akin to modern-day football teams. Despite their founders' best efforts, too, the music's innate emotional potency in each case saw both bands and choirs becoming involved in workers' movements – an enduring role again commemorated in Brassed Off.

Amid the vagaries of the 21st-century music scene, the key quality cited by both Childs and Jones to explain their music's continuing popularity is this same capacity to stir the soul and tug on the heart-strings. "For me it comes down to passion," Childs says. "None of these players are getting paid to perform, they'll often have travelled for hours and hundreds of miles for a concert, then they leave their other lives outside, and put everything into making music – that's the passion you can hear." Similarly, taken aback as he is by the Fron Choir's latterly meteoric fortunes, Jones can only explain the public's response in terms of his own experiences as a member. "When you're singing in the choir," he says dreamily, "it's just like having 60 pairs of arms around you."