Tag: Sheffield Brass Network

Audience development

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At the recent Sheffield Brass Network event, “Better contact with the media and your audience”, Dr Sarah Price was invited to give a presentation on ‘Understanding audiences for the contemporary arts’. Dr Sarah Price is an audience researcher and member of the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC), a Research Associate for the AHRC-funded project ‘Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts’, and, at the time of her presentation, had just reached the culmination of a 2½ year study working with arts organisations in Birmingham, London, Liverpool, Bristol and Sheffield to explore how people engage with contemporary dance, theatre, music, visual art and everything in between to develop strategies for recruiting and retaining new audiences. Sarah took the opportunity at […]

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Effective Social Media and blogging for bands

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At the recent Sheffield Brass Network event, “Better contact with the media and your audience”, Alex Burns was invited to give a presentation on ‘Effective Social Media and blogging for bands’. Alex has a music performance degree at the University of Sheffield, an MA in Musicology, works alongside several local music organisations and currently holds a trumpet residency with the Sheffield Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as playing cornet with the Yorkshire Championship Section Old Silkstone Band. Alex also administrates the award-winning Classicalexburns classical music blog. Here’s a synopsis of what Alex revealed about social media at the event: What can social media do for my band? – Reach new audiences – Keep your already engaged audiences up to date with […]

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Funding Advice Seminar Review

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After several months of organisation and liaison, we were pleased to be able to facilitate a funding advice seminar on Wednesday 6th February. Stuart Young introduced the Sheffield Brass Network (SBN) event and thanked Chris Palmer and Sam Craggs of SoundBytes Media for hosting it at The Foundry Studio in Sheffield. Presentations followed by Richard Brown of Arts Council England, Peter Foyle of the South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau (SYFAB), and Rachel Veitch-Straw of Key Fund, with over 30 attendees present from all corners of the Sheffield City Region and beyond, including Lincolnshire, North Nottinghamshire, Doncaster and Chesterfield. Ensembles other than brass bands had been invited to take part in the event and we were pleased to welcome representatives from local choirs and orchestra. […]

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A brass band at Christmastime

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The tradition of singing Local Carols in the villages to the North West of Sheffield goes back to at least the late Eighteenth Century; the Local Carols were generally composed by local musicians, organists or choirmasters and the carols were often given local names. Originally this is thought to have been a reaction against the banning of many carols by both the Church and the State. Some Carols caused controversy and it is known that ‘While Shepherds Watched’ had to be cleaned up by the Victorians for being too crude. There is also strong evidence that ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ was a call to 18th Century Jacobites to rebel [1]. Examples of locally written tunes are, ‘Bright and Joyful’ […]

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Engagement benefits with leisure-time music are multi-layered

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‘Making music is fun, uses different skills to those you need to employ in the rest of your life, is relaxing and stress-busting, and makes you feel better about yourself. In scientific terms, there is now a growing body of’ proven ‘research which shows that this can amount to better physical and mental health: making music really is good for you’ – and therefore ‘saves the NHS and social services money’. ‘Everyone can make music, from a two-year-old to a 90-year-old, whether rich or poor, disabled or not. It can help to bring communities together across generations, social classes, income brackets, disabled’, and able-bodied. ‘An obvious benefit of that is that it reduces loneliness and social exclusion, which are a […]

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