Tough Times

It has been a difficult year for the band. Attendances at practice have been well down over even last year, to the extent that practice has actually been cancelled for the last couple of weeks. Meanwhile, we only have a handful of events for the year, and have been in the position where one of those events we could only go ahead with because of guest players, and another we formed a combined band and would have had to cancel otherwise.

There is, unfortunately, no sign that this is likely to improve – the band hasn’t really recruited anyone for the past few years (and, indeed, only one regular player since I joined eight years ago), and the existing members are either starting to find it harder to carry on due to age or are becoming increasingly busy with other things. The upshot is that we can’t really learn and then play any new tunes (since we’re absolutely reliant on people who aren’t attending practices and so not learning the new tunes), and even without that we’re down to the bare bones for events.

I’m not really sure where things go from here. The truth is that almost all non-competing bands are suffering the same problems: because competition bands absorb almost all of the players, the bands that are left are all shrinking and finding it hard to carry on.

Meanwhile, the events that give those bands their purpose are also suffering a bit of a lull – partly because they’ve never recovered fully from Covid, partly because the organisers are basically getting sick of what is a fairly thankless task, and partly because the funding for the events is receding sharply (from the Council point of view it’s basically gone, as budgets have had to be cut to the bone; and corporate sponsors are cutting back, or seeking to provide practical rather than monetary support – which will well received, but sometimes there’s just a need).

All of which amounts to saying I’m not sure if the band is meaningfully going to survive, and I’m also not sure I’m keen to remain involved if it’s just to be the person who ends up switching off the lights for the last time. Which is a shame.