Paper idea refining.

Looking at it more and more, I think I might go with the idea on British Brass Bands, but I want to expand beyond that. There were tons of innovations to wind music during the time like the invention of valved brass, the tuba, and the standardization of families of transposing instruments. In Britain and America both, there were hundreds of interesting characters including composers, band leaders, Italian virtuoso conductors, and eccentric soloists. The repertoire came from places all over. It was both from original sources and transcriptions of orchestral literature. The instrumentation kept changing over the years. The keyed brass were exotic instruments, and the multi-belled brass looked like they were straight out of Dr. Seuss. Even better, there were mass concerts, one such created by Pat Gilmore, which made Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand look like chamber music. His was called the International Peace Jubilee, and it contained over 2,000 instrumentalists accompanied by a choir of 20,000.I like this period of Band history. They were never more popular than this, and they were something far more serious. Today, we look back on them like they belong to this cheesy, naive tradition of music making. On the contrary, they were quite serious and as skilled as any orchestra on the planet. We take Sousa marches for granted, but as a band leader, he was one who commanded respect and did his job with a lot of gravity. There is a story that on his first day of rehearsal for a new season after adding 19 new members to his band, Sousa spent two and a half hours on 16 bars of an overture. Starting with principle clarinetist, he made him play the passage over and over until it met his expectations. Then, he concentrated on the second clarinetist until it was identical to the first, and so on. He did every player in the band like this to achieve the results he wanted. That was the kind of detail they played with, and the concerts were as good as any. I think I can make a decent paper on this. There would be enough small sources, but also, an old teacher of mine wrote the big book on this, so I have a connection to it in that way.