As new students with glittering instruments settle into music colleges, Royal College of Music professor Arthur Wilson remembers his own student days playing on a...

...Mix 'N' Match

When I began my student days at the Royal College of Music in 1946, I turned up with an instrument that was half a Besson and half something unidentifiable. Nowadays, with a range of instruments that grows bigger and better every year, it's hard to imagine that back then you simply couldn't get what you wanted. My bits and pieces were the best I could do, and lots more of us played on mongrel instruments too.

After the war, there was a government embargo on importing foreign (by which I really mean American) instruments into the UK. It was a deliberate measure to protect British manufacturers, so even if you had the money, there was no way of getting what you wanted.

I have a photo, taken in 1860, of my great grandfather holding a German instrument, and I used to wonder why my father and I had to manage with pea-shooters when there had obviously been larger bore instruments in this country many years before.

The first decent instrument I actually saw at close range belonged to an American serviceman who had an army instrument. "Why do you play these things?" he said to me, fairly shocked at the sight of my caseful of jumble. The answer was very simple.

Within a few years, musical life began to recover from the wartime problems, and young British brass players had their first chance to listen to foreign orchestras. For us, the visit of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in the early 1950s was a revelation. We all went overboard for the sound of their Conns, and people did all sorts of things to their instruments to improve them.

While the musicians were in a state of excitement (and terrible frustration) about what they wanted from manufacturers in matters of design and sound quality, the Board of Trade ban on imports was still in place, and you can imagine the resentment we felt against this, also against the instrument makers, who were, naturally, happy for it to continue.

Boosey & Hawkes did produce a new model, the Imperial, which I adopted myself as it was a vast improvement on what I had, but orchestras in general didn't go for it because it was medium bore. Heads were still too full of what they had heard in the NYPO concerts, live and even over the radio (it was called the wireless in those days!), and we were now too discriminating to be fobbed off with half-hearted imitations.

My first trip to America was in 1955 with the Philharmonia. We were still not able to buy US instruments here, although there was a rumour that Boosey & Hawkes had one at their factory. By this time Boosey & Hawkes were making a large bore trombone, which still disappointed the players on top of being very expensive.

By arrangement with the Philharmonia, we were loaned a set of these instruments to play on the tour, and Boosey & Hawkes were particularly keen for Alfred Flaszynski, principal trombone at the time, to play and promote this model. They later offered us a deal on the price but nobody wanted one anyway, and I actually avoided using mine, although Alf did his bit for the firm.

We could have been entirely wrong about this, but you only know how you feel about an instrument by blowing it, and the general feeling was that this thing blew as if it had been made of leftover lengths of G trombone tubing. And there were probably miles of that lying around now that the Bb/F bass trombone was taking over so completely.

We all bought Conns and used them for the tour. It was a temptation we just couldn't resist. When we were in Canada, we saw photos in the windows of music shops showing Harry Dilley (trumpet) and Flaszynski playing Boosey & Hawkes instruments, but a Boosey rep heard us warming up and clocked that we were playing Conns.

We never had any proof of being set up, but when we flew back to London, the customs men went straight for us. Fred Mansfield's bass trombone was confiscated, and mine would have been too, except that I had left it with an American friend who brought it over later.

It was bitterly disappointing not to be allowed to bring back American instruments with us. We carried on as before, but a glimmer of hope appeared through one of our regular conductors, Guido Cantelli, an Italian who had worked with the NBC Symphony Orchestra and who was regarded as the probable successor to Toscanini.

He was horrified at our situation, knew all about the embargo, and said that he had already arranged for the La Scala Opera trombone section to have American instruments and he would do the same for us. Very sadly, the problem was not solved that easily. Cantelli died in an air crash in 1956 and our immediate hopes also went down with that plane.

It's hard to appreciate how instrumentally impoverished we were in those days. George Maxted, Principal Trombone of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, was bursting at the seams, and was one of the pioneers at developing his own instrument. He had a big bell fitted to whatever it was he played, and Sid Langston at the BBC Symphony Orchestra, somehow acquired a Conn Conqueror, and he was one of those lucky people who make a great big sound anyway, so the problem wasn't so urgent for him.

We talk so freely nowadays about schools and styles of playing, but in those days, people came from everywhere - service bands, brass bands - it was a total mixture. There was no school. We were there because we could play our instruments. So everyone latched onto the new thing, and that was the emergence of the present school.

It hasn't been a direct copy of the American style of playing; simply that their sound sparked it off. People have experimented with German instruments but it just wasn't the same, and it didn't work for British players. So although we eventually acquired American instruments, we fitted them to a British way of playing.

Arthur Wilson comes from a family of trombone players. He spent his National Service in the Band of the Coldstream Guards, attending the Royal College of Music during the same time. After a wide variety of freelance work, and one year with the London Symphony Orchestra, he joined the Philharmonia Orchestra as Second Trombone in 1951 and was appointed Principal Trombone in 1963. Arthur stayed with the Philharmonia until 1979, then left to join the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. After one year, he left to resume freelance life. He has been a professor at the Royal College of Music since 1967.

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