Thanks Jon. Happy to explain, thanks for asking. It's an annual contest for brass bands around the country. Bands are organised into sections, a bit like the football leagues. They can get promoted, or relegated, depending on contest results.

Every area of country has a regional qualifying contest. The top two bands from each area go forward to compete in the national finals. This year we (Chalford band) won the south west regional qualifier.

For our section (1st), the final is at Cheltenham race course. Every band plays the same test piece of music. This year it's a brand new work called 'St. James'. It depicts the fire of London, so as you can imagine, very dramatic and an enjoyable piece of music to play and listen to. Although you wouldn't want to hear it played 20 times!

It is going to be tough, as we're up against the best bands in the country. They have all won their regional qualifiers. So we'll see, but the band is very relaxed about it. The achievement was getting there in the first place. Contest starts about 3pm and we won't know the result until 10pm!

Well the result was not as good as we'd hoped. Came 15th out of 20 bands. And this is thing about brass band contests - however well you think you've played (and we did), if your interpretation of the music is not to the adjudicator's liking, then the performance won't rate highly. Of course technical accuracy and detail matter too, so there were certainly bands that created a better execution of the piece overall.

Got to remember also, that these are the 20 top bands nationally, so being ranked as 15th best is not a bad outcome.

But everyone was happy coming off the stage. We could not have played much better, and achieved our potential. Which is all anyone can hope for :)

I think coming 15th nationally is a massive achievement and you and the band should be proud of yourselves. Congratulations!

You are right are about how subjective this sort of thing is though. I can remember entering a music competition when I was younger and our band didn’t do as well as we hoped, mainly because the judges came from a Jazz background and our sound was more acoustic rock.

Hi Richard,

Welcome to the forum, it’s great to have you here with us.

I’m Laura, and my partner is Jon who is also here on the forum. We started Aunty Social World last summer as a community for introverts, as well as those who experience social anxiety. We’re a small but diverse group, all with different backgrounds, lifestyles and interests. Everyone is welcome here :).

I can imagine that being retired it’s important to have a routine and activities to focus on. The weather has been all over the place here too. We've just finished watching today’s stage in the Tour de France. If you like tennis, Andrew has started a thread about this in the ‘Hobbies and interests’ category 😊.

Sorry to read that your wife has not been well, and I hope all goes well with her transfusion tomorrow.

Great to meet you.

Laura

Same out west Mike, but you’re supposed to keep it in Barry remember 🤣.

Looking cool and calm here tomorrow 🤞

Hopefully some better weather here tomorrow as well. 🤞

Glad you had a good one Liz. Ours was good, just very busy with lots of things going on at once - looking forward to more of a usual pace this weekend 🚴🏻‍♀️🧘🏻‍♀️

Hope you have a good week 😊