2022年高级口译阅读：铜管乐队的衰落

　　新东方在线英语频道给大家整理的相关内容，希望能够对大家的英语考试备考有所帮助，更多有关英语的备考内容，欢迎随时关注新东方在线英语频道。

　　Saving Britain’s proud brass band legacy

　　Practice night for Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band, one of the oldest

　　brass bands in Britain. History lines the walls of the Yorkshire band’s practice

　　room: gleaming trophies of past victories, a banner for Best of Brass Champions

　　1983 and, on one wall, a poster: “The Yorkshire Coalfield — Memories.” It shows

　　a miner, face blackened from the pit, and names every closed Yorkshire

　　colliery.

　　Only three former miners play for Carlton Main these days; the band has

　　survived without the pit, its ranks swelled by young male and female

　　professionals and five members under 20. This is the typical, new, middle-class

　　face of brass bands. Yet their links to a bygone mining tradition persist.

　　Twenty-five years after brass bands marched during the miners’ strike, this

　　underground music is in the spotlight again. A new compilation, The Music Lives

　　on Now the Mines Have Gone, brings 11 colliery bands together, including Carlton

　　Main. They will line up against another colliery brass album, by the Dinnington

　　Colliery Band, from Sheffield, the stars of the BBC show A Band for Britain,

　　which follows Sue Perkins’s efforts to save Dinnington. And next month, the

　　Leeds-based Opera North commemorates the year-long miners’ strike with Songs at

　　the Year’s End, a song cycle for brass band.

　　But what future do these historic groups have? Most brass bands today have

　　outlived their mining communities, and the effects are profound. When collieries

　　and their bands were the heart of a close-knit, thriving village, bands played

　　for pleasure and pride.

　　The Yorkshire-born Stan Lippeatt, 60, is a former Grimethorpe bandsman who

　　started playing when he was 10 years old. His father played, so did his

　　grandfathers, his uncles and his two brothers. “Bands became the pillars of the

　　village; they turned out to march on Armistice Sunday, they would play the

　　Christmas carols. They were something for villagers to go to when there wasn’t

　　much TV about,” he says. Lippeatt founded the annual Butlins Mineworkers Open

　　Brass Band Championships. “A guy would be on his holidays in Torquay and he’d be

　　proud to boast he came from the home town of a band.”

　　The Barnsley poet Ian McMillan, who has written the words for Opera North’s

　　Songs at the Year’s End, believes that brass bands still play a role in their

　　communities. “They are an image for how collectivism can survive. And when you

　　have an area that’s had the collectivism knocked out of it [such as Grimethorpe]

　　any image of that collectivism and community activity is a good thing.”

　　Last week, a brass band played outside the Corus steelworks on Teesside as

　　it was closed down. With the strike of 1984-85, collectivism took on a political

　　edge. Brass bands led marches to London. They led rallies in villages across the

　　mining heartlands, North and South, and they played at the funerals of miners

　　killed on picket lines. A sense of lost camaraderie remains. “Margaret Thatcher

　　didn’t just decimate the pits, she decimated our community spirit,” says the

　　former miner Ray Sykes, the 63-year-old chairman of Carlton Main. “With the

　　closure of the collieries, she’s hurt my band.”

　　Today, bands are no longer the “glue” of their communities. The

　　infrastructure they relied on — miners’ social clubs, bandstands and so on — has

　　largely disappeared. And though they struggle on, the bands are disappearing,

　　too. From about 20,000 brass bands at the turn of the 19th century, numbers are

　　down to an estimated 1,000 bands. Anecdotally, bandsmen will tell you of ten

　　bands a year folding. Banding’s grassroots are dying.

　　Why the crisis? The problem is money: both too much and too little. In

　　recent years a footballing analogy has become more potent as sponsorship money

　　has flooded the top echelons of brass banding, leaving the lower bands fighting

　　for survival.

　　The top bands, such as Grimethorpe Colliery (famously the one playing in

　　the 1996 movie Brassed Off), Black Dyke and Brighouse and Rastrick — all in

　　Yorkshire — and the Wales-based Cory, can afford to pay their players

　　five-figure retainers in addition to concert fees and travel expenses to

　　contests and rehearsals.

　　Most players today own their instruments (though brass doesn’t come cheap;

　　a tuba can cost ￡7,000). The catch is that the better you get, the more it

　　costs. Carlton Main compete in the championship, pushing running costs to about

　　￡30,000 a year. Attending one contest can cost ￡3,000, for coach hire, the

　　conductor’s fee and the sheet music (at least ￡100 a pop). Carlton Main’s

　　players pay their own hotel costs and for travel to rehearsals. Self-sufficiency

　　has replaced collectivism; how very Thatcherite.

　　词句笔记：

　　outlive:经受住，比……活得长，渡过

　　knock out：赶出去

　　echelon：等级，阶层

　　tuba：低音大喇叭

　　conductor：乐队指挥

　　以上就是新东方在线英语频道给大家整理的相关内容，希望对大家有所帮助，更多备考内容，欢迎随时关注新东方在线英语频道。