| Chapter : | Introduction |
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At the other end of the scale is the notion that music does signify something besides itself. Kivy (1980), for example, argues that both the conventional associations and the abstract facts of a piece contribute to a connection of the musical piece with emotion. 7 Langer (1953) argues that music is unlike a language but does have some kind of emotional content. More specifically, she argues that ‘music never communicates anything … specific … [in terms of specific emotions], but rather is a constantly moving picture of a single all-embracing Emotion’ (p. 27). This does not mean, however, that what is communicated as emotion is vague or nebulous; Langer (1948) also notes that ‘music can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach’ (p. 191).
These early approaches have largely given way to explorations of the ways in which music is involved in forging connections to memory, place, time and things, in multiply meaningful and multiply referenced ways (see Qureshi, 2000; Stokes, 1994). Such approaches centrally involve emotion in their articulation of linkages between persons and persons, and persons and world. These approaches do not posit music as emotional language but as a mode in which emotional currents can pass, forge connections, and be reworked, reformed and reimagined. It is this rich musical current that Grayville police seek to manipulate in and through the members of the Grayville police band.
The Grayville Band: Musical Public Relations Unit
The Grayville police band was formed in 1884, making it the first police band in Australia. At its inception the band partly comprised a brass band with a membership of 14 (all male) volunteers issuing from the ranks of the Metropolitan Foot Police, which had itself been established in Grayville in 1838, making it the first police force established in Australia and one of the oldest in the world; the first, the London Metropolitan Police, was created by Sir Robert Peel only 9 years earlier. Steven Lawler, an ex-band member who has written part of the history of the police band in his postgraduate diploma in musicology thesis, divides the history of the police band into five distinct periods. These periods are ‘band formation’, from 1884 to 1926, ‘recession’, from 1926 until 1945, ‘band reformation’, from 1945 until 1947, a period in which the band became a full-time branch and public relations unit from 1957 until 1974, and a contemporary period characterized by a change in instrumentation and an expansion in its public relations role from 1974 until the present (Lawler, 1994, p. 135). Perhaps the most consistent theme running throughout four of the five periods of history that Lawler identifies is one in which the barometric quality of the band is central. Lawler (1994) suggests that, from its earliest formation, the performances of the police band have been associated in the public mind, or at least in the public press, with the state of the police department more generally (pp. 85, 118). Public comment in the local press about early performances, which were inclusive of Fantasia, Galop, Intermezzo, Lancer, March, Polka, Quadrille, Selection and Waltz musical genres, reveals that the band was held not only in high esteem by police officers during its early years but that it also inspired in members of the public a certain esteem for the larger police force of which it was a part. In the band’s first ceremonial marching engagement in 1885, for example, the quality of the police band’s musical rendering, combined with its ‘well-drilled discipline’ in marching, was noted by the Town Clerk, who conveyed to the Police Commissioner in a letter of appreciation for the performance that: