Many years ago I spent a summer in southeastern Poland. One day, on a hike, I came upon a gathering in the late morning sun. A group of people had assembled on a meadow just outside a village, an audience in waiting as it turned out, standing quietly against the backdrop of the Tatra Mountains. The craggy scarps were distant and blue, afloat in the thin dove-grey haze of early September. The musicians were arriving, one by one. All of them men, each of them with a moustache, most of them elderly—or so it seemed to me at the time.Article continues after advertisement
Some of them carried battered black instrument bags, others came cradling their shiny trumpets, French horns and trombones in their arms. A brass band. They all wore stiff dark woollen clothes, too warm for the season and the sun, I thought. And they wore hats, at least that’s what my memory tells me now, black bucket-style hats, perhaps made from felt, water-repellent and cosy, suitable for all sorts of outdoor pursuits. It took a while for each musician to take up his place at the bottom of a gentle slope facing the audience. Everybody apart from me seemed local. They knew what to expect. Occasionally someone in the audience shouted encouragement or the name of a piece of music they wished to hear, or maybe a joke, or whatever their tradition may have recommended for the occasion.
